The far-right leader of the League and vice-president of the Italian government, Matteo Salvini, was definitively acquitted this Wednesday in the controversial ship trial. Open armsfrom the Spanish NGO of the same name. In this trial he was accused of kidnapping people and omitting official acts to prevent the disembarkation of 147 migrants rescued at sea in 2019. The Court of Cassation, equivalent to the Spanish Supreme Court, upheld the decision taken by the Palermo court a year ago and thus closed the case.
“Defending the borders is not a crime,” Salvini euphorically proclaimed on social networks, who had made this affair a symbol of his fight against irregular immigration, one of the electoral banners of his party. On the contrary, the director of Open Arms, Óscar Camps, believes that “it is not a technical decision, it is a political decision”.
“Justice was not served today, but impunity was built. To say that there is no crime when a minister strands people rescued at sea for days means legitimizing the use of human suffering as a political instrument. What happened today is worrying for the rule of law,” Camps said.
In August 2019, Salvini was Interior Minister in the government of Giuseppe Conte, in which the League was in coalition with the Five Star Movement. He then launched a controversial crusade against NGOs rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean, with a declared policy of “port closure”. One of the longest fights took place with the Open Arms ship. For 19 days, Salvini prevented the disembarkation of 147 migrants, anchored off the island of Lampedusa. Finally, in a critical situation on board – two toilets, everyone was sleeping on the floor, 13 people jumped into the water and 27 minors were evacuated – the Agrigento prosecutor intervened. He ordered them to disembark and opened an investigation which led to a trial.
The trial has become a crucial legal debate, with a huge political context, over the rights of migrants rescued at sea, the activity of NGOs helping them in the Mediterranean and the measures governments can apply to prevent their arrival. As then, it is a very current debate, in which the executive of Giorgia Meloni applies the same heavy hand to irregular immigration.
For this reason, Óscar Camps believes that this sets a dangerous precedent: “It not only erases the past, but also allows for the future. This authorizes other governments to close ports, to detain people on ships. We will continue at sea, they will continue in the palaces: history will judge those who are on the right side.
The first decision established that Italy had no legal obligation to grant the ship a port and attributed this responsibility to Spain, as it was the first country with which the ship would come into contact after the rescue operation. However, the judges did not fail to recognize that international rules on sea rescue are outdated, because they do not cover the activity of NGOs in the Mediterranean, and should be modified.
The judges came to say that with the existing laws, even though they considered them “incomplete” and “inadequate,” they could reach no other conclusion. The judgment underlines that the laws which govern the rescue of migrants on the high seas date back “40 years” and “from a geopolitical context completely different from the current one”. In other words, “they do not envisage the missions of private NGO ships (…) to compensate for the incapacity of States and international organizations to manage migratory flows”.
The Court did not fail to emphasize that it would be “desirable, and certainly not postponeable, given the scale of current migratory flows, the adoption of a system of international rules aimed at imposing on States, in matters of rescue at sea and assistance to survivors, duties of cooperation and solidarity”. In addition, he stressed that he had absolved Salvini for the “vagueness” of international precepts, which did not impose any obligation on him to grant a port to the ship. Open arms.
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