ROME (AP) – A judge on Saturday ordered former Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini to stand trial on charges of kidnapping for refusing to let a Spanish migrant rescue ship dock in an Italian port in 2019, holding them on people at sea for days.
Judge Lorenzo Iannelli set September 15 as the date of the trial during a hearing in the courtroom of the Palermo bunker in Sicily.
Salvini, who attended the meeting, insisted that he was doing his job and duty only by refusing to enter the Open Arms rescue ship and the 147 people he rescued in the Mediterranean.
“Will I be judged for this, because I defended my country?” posted to Twitter after the decision. “I will go with my head up, also in your name.”
Palermo prosecutors have accused Salvini of abandoning his job and kidnapping him for keeping migrants at sea off the Italian island of Lampedusa for days in August 2019. During the confrontation, some migrants desperately threw themselves overboard. , while the captain pleaded for a safe, close place. I’m wearing. Finally, after 19 days of ordeal, the remaining 83 migrants on board were allowed to disembark in Lampedusa.
Salvini, the leader of the League’s right-wing party, maintained a tough line on migration as interior minister during Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s first government in 2018-2019. While urging nations in the European Union to do more to receive migrants arriving in Italy, Salvini argued that humanitarian rescue ships only encourage human traffickers from Libya. He claimed that his policy of denying them ports had actually saved lives, discouraging risky voyages across the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe.
His lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, said she was calm despite the decision, saying she was sure the court would eventually rule that there was no kidnapping.
“There was no restriction on their freedom,” she told reporters after the indictment. “The ship could go anywhere. There was only a ban on entering the port. But he had 100,000 options. ”
Open Arms, in turn, welcomed the decision to try Salvini and confirmed that he had registered as a civil party in the case, along with some survivors of the rescue, the city of Barcelona where Open Arms and other humanitarian aid groups are located.
The group’s founder, Oscar Camps, said Salvini’s decision to prosecute him for his actions as interior minister was “historic”, saying European political leaders could be held accountable for violating migrants’ human rights.
“This process is a reminder to Europe and the world that there are principles of individual responsibility in politics,” Camps told a news conference on Saturday. The criminal investigation decision shows “it is possible to identify the responsibility of the protagonists of this tragedy at sea”.
Salvini is also under investigation for another similar confrontation with migrants involving the Italian coastguard ship Gregoretti, which it refused to dock in the summer of 2019.
The prosecutor in this case from Catania, Sicily, Andrea Bonomo, recommended last week that Salvini not be tried, claiming that he is pursuing government policy only when he has kept the 116 migrants at sea for five days.
Italy and other southern EU nations, such as Spain and Greece, have long argued that the other members of the 27-nation bloc need to do more to help them cope with the influx of migrants.
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