ROME (AP) – A judge on Saturday ordered former Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini to stand trial on kidnapping charges for refusing to dock a Spanish migrant lifeboat in an Italian port in 2019 and kept the people on board at sea for days.
Judge Lorenzo Iannelli set September 15 as the trial date during a trial in the Palermo bunker court in Sicily.
Salvini, who attended the trial, insisted he was only doing his job and his duty by refusing access to the Open Arms rescue ship and the 147 people who rescued it in the Mediterranean.
“I’m going to stand trial for defending my country?” he tweeted after the decision. “I raise my head, also in your name.”
Prosecutors in Palermo have accused Salvini of neglect and kidnapping for keeping the migrants at sea from the Italian island of Lampedusa in August. During the absence, some migrants threw themselves desperately overboard when the captain pleaded for a safe, nearby port. Finally, after a 19-day ordeal, the remaining 83 migrants still on board were allowed to disembark from Lampedusa.
Salvini, leader of the right-wing league party, maintained a hard line on migration as interior minister during the first government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, from 2018-2019. While European Union countries are demanding more to take in migrants arriving in Italy, Salvini has argued that humanitarian rescue ships only encourage human traffickers in Libya. He claims that his policy of refusing the port has saved lives by discouraging the risky voyages across the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe.
His lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, said she was calm despite the ruling and said 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 was filed. ‘The ship had the opportunity to go everywhere. There was only a ban on the port. But it had 100,000 options. ”
Open Arms, in turn, welcomed the decision to execute 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 is based, and other humanitarian aid. groups.
The group’s founder, Oscar Camps, said the decision to prosecute Salvini because of the actions he took when he was Home Secretary was ‘historic’, showing that European political leaders can be held accountable for not following the do not respect human rights of migrants.
“This trial 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 prosecution decision shows that ‘it is possible to identify the responsibility of the protagonists of this tragedy at sea.’
Salvini is also being investigated for another similar migrant favor that the Italian coastguard ship Gregoretti refused in the summer of 2019.
The prosecutor in that case in Catania, Sicily, Andrea Bonomo, last week recommended that Salvini not be executed, arguing that he was only carrying out government policy when he kept the 116 migrants at sea for five days.
Italy and other southern EU countries, such as Spain and Greece, have long argued that other members of the bloc of 27 countries should do more to help them cope with the influx of migrants.
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