Italy's Salvini faces verdict for blocking migrants at sea. Case weighs limits of stemming migration

MILAN — Italy’s deputy premier, Matteo Salvini, is sounding defiant as he awaits Friday’s verdict in Sicily for blocking some 100 migrants at sea on a humanitarian rescue boat in 2019 when he was interior minister.

Salvini, who leads the Euroskeptic, anti-migrant League, told a rally last week that “defending the borders, the dignity, the laws, the honor of a country cannot ever be a crime.”

He has vowed to enter the court in Palermo with his “head held high” to hear a court’s verdict on whether he is guilty of detaining the migrants aboard the Open Arms rescue ship in Italy's southernmost island of Lampedusa for five days in August 2019. He is also charged with failing to fulfill his public duties.

Prosecutors have demanded a six-year jail sentence. A sentence of over five years would also automatically bar him from office. Whatever Friday's sentencing, it won't have immediate effect as verdicts in Italy are only considered final once two levels of appeals are exhausted, a process that can take years.

In August 2019, Open Arms approached Italy with 150 migrants rescued at sea, some in the Maltese rescue area, with Lampedusa the closest port. They spent 10 days in international waters and another five days within sight of Lampedusa, with those onboard growing increasingly agitated amid deteriorating hygienic conditions. Some migrants threw themselves overboard, and minors were evacuated during the stand-off.

Eventually, a court ordered the remaining 89 people onboard to be allowed to disembark in Lampedusa.

Open Arms' Italian lawyer, Arturo Salerni, dismissed Salvini's claim that he was defending Italy's borders, saying it was his duty as a public official to protect the human rights of people on board.

“The supreme duty, especially of those who belong to governments, is to defend international laws and conventions, and people's rights,'' said Salerni, who is representing Open Arms as an injured party in the trial. ”It cannot be that the interior minister ... can deprive anyone of freedom."

The Open Arms standoff was just one of more than 20 during Salvini's hardline stand against migration when he was interior minister from 2018-2919 during the first government of former Premier Giuseppe Conte. He closed Italian ports to humanitarian rescue ships and accused the groups that rescued migrants at sea of effectively encouraging smugglers.

In another incident, a German captain, Carola Rackete, entered the Lampedusa port in June 2019 against Salvini’s orders after declaring a state of emergency on her boat, the Sea-Watch 3, which had been carrying 40 rescued people for some 16 days. She was soon arrested. Italy eventually dropped charges of aiding illegal migration against her.

Now transport minister in Premier Giorgia Meloni’s far-right-led government, Salvini has the support of the premier and other ministers in the Palermo trial.

Since taking power in 2022, Meloni has moved to crackdown on migration, striking deals with northern African nations in a bid to prevent departures while also setting up still-dormant centers in Albania aimed to vet migrants rescued at sea in the non-EU country without setting foot in Italy.

"Salvini gets the solidarity of the entire government,'' Meloni told the Italian Senate on Wednesday, to a standing ovation from right-wing lawmakers.

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