ROME (AP) – A judge on Saturday ordered former Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini to try for kidnapping for refusing to let a Spanish migrant rescue boat dock in an Italian port in 2019, keeping people at sea for days.
Judge Lorenzo Iannelli set September 15 as the date for the trial during a hearing in the courtroom of the Palermo bunker in Sicily.
Salvini, who attended the hearing, insisted that he was only doing his job and duty by refusing entry to the Open Arms rescue ship and the 147 people he had rescued in the Mediterranean Sea.
“Am I going to trial for that, for defending my country?” he tweeted after the decision. “I will go with my head held high, also in your name.”
Palermo prosecutors have accused Salvini of abandoning duty and kidnapping for keeping migrants at sea off the Italian island of Lampedusa for days in August 2019. During the confrontation, some migrants threw themselves into the edge desperate as the captain pleaded for a safe place and close port. Finally, after a 19-day ordeal, the remaining 83 migrants still on board were allowed to disembark in Lampedusa.
Salvini, leader of the right-wing League party, had maintained a hard line on migration as interior minister during the first government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte between 2018 and 2019. Despite demanding that nations of the European Union do more to accommodate immigrants arriving in Italy, Salvini argued that humanitarian rescue ships only encouraged traffickers in Libya-based people. He claimed that his policy of rejecting them saved lives by discouraging risky voyages across the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe.
Her lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, said she was calm despite the decision, and said she was sure the court would end up determining there was no kidnapping.
“There was no restriction on his freedom,” he told reporters after dictating the indictment. “The boat had the ability to go anywhere. There was only a ban on entering the port. But I had 100,000 options. ”
Open Arms, meanwhile, welcomed the decision to sue Salvini and confirmed that he has registered as a civil party in the case, along with some survivors of the rescue, the city of Barcelona where Open Arms is located and other humanitarian aid. groups.
The group’s founder, Oscar Camps, said the decision to prosecute Salvini for actions taken when he was interior minister was “historic,” showing that European political leaders can be held accountable for not respecting the human rights of migrants.
“This trial reminds Europe and the world that there are principles of individual responsibility in politics,” Camps said at a news conference Saturday. The decision to prosecute shows “it is possible to identify the responsibility of the protagonists of this tragedy at sea.”
Salvini is also being investigated for another similar migrant confrontation related to Italian Coast Guard ship Gregoretti that refused to let dock in the summer of 2019.
The prosecutor in that case in Catania, Sicily, Andrea Bonomo, recommended that Salvini not be tried, arguing that he only pursued government policy when he kept the 116 immigrants at sea for five days.
Italy and other southern EU nations, such as Spain and Greece, have long argued that other members of the 27-nation bloc should do more to help them cope with the influx of migrants.
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