On Friday, an Italian court acquitted Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini of charges of abuse of official power and illegal detention of migrants on a lifeboat in 2019 when he was Home Secretary. The prosecution requested a six-year sentence for him. TASR informs about it based on the reports of APA and AP agencies.
A court in Palermo, Sicily, issued a verdict after a trial that lasted more than three years. An appeal can be filed against the decision. In the summer of 2019, Salvini ordered that they did not allow the ship of the Spanish humanitarian organization Open Arms to enter the harbor on the Italian island of Lampedusa. The vessel sat 147 migrants from Africa so it was stuck at sea until after they were not allowed to anchor on this island for three weeks by order of the court.
The current minister of transport and leader of the right-wing populist party Liga constantly defended himself against accusations of abuse of powers and denial of freedoms to migrants, claiming that he acted in the interest of protecting Italy’s borders. He marked the process as politicized. As Minister of the Interior, Salvini promoted the policy “closed ports” for ships rescuing migrants in The Mediterranean Sea and their crews accused that they cooperate with traffickers and attract hundreds of thousands of migrants to Italy.
