The far-right leader of the League and vice president of the Italian Government, Matteo Salvini, has been definitively acquitted this Wednesday in the controversial ship trial Open Armsfrom the Spanish NGO of the same name. In this process he was accused of kidnapping people and omission of official acts for preventing the disembarkation of 147 migrants rescued at sea in 2019. The Court of Cassation, equivalent to the Spanish Supreme Court, thus closes the case.
“Defending borders is not a crime,” Salvini, who had turned the case into a symbol of his fight against irregular immigration, one of his party’s electoral banners, euphorically proclaimed on social media. On the contrary, the director of Open Arms, Óscar Camps, believes that “it is not a technical decision, it is a political decision.”
“Nor has justice been done today, but impunity has been built. Saying that there is no crime when a minister blocks people rescued at sea for days means legitimizing the use of human suffering as a political instrument. What happened today is worrying for the rule of law,” declared Camps.
In August 2019, Salvini was Minister of the Interior in the Government of , in which the League was in coalition with the Five Star Movement. He then embarked on a controversial crusade against NGOs that rescue migrants in the Mediterranean, with a declared policy of “closing ports.” One of the longest fights was with the Open Arms ship. For 19 days Salvini prevented the disembarkation of 147 migrants, anchored off the island of Lampedusa. In the end, in a critical situation on board – two bathrooms, everyone sleeping on the floor, 13 people jumped into the water and 27 minors were evacuated – the Agrigento prosecutor intervened. He ordered them to go ashore and opened an investigation, which led to a trial.
The trial had become a crucial legal debate, with an enormous political background, about the rights of migrants rescued at sea, the activity of NGOs that help them in the Mediterranean and the measures that governments can apply to stop their arrival. As then, it is a very current discussion at the moment, in which the Executive of Giorgia Meloni.
For this reason, Óscar Camps believes that it creates a dangerous precedent: “It not only erases the past, but also authorizes the future. It authorizes other governments to close ports, to retain people on ships. We will continue at sea, they will continue in the palaces: history will judge those who are on the right side.”
legal to grant a port to the ship and attributed that responsibility to Spain, as it was the first country with which the ship contacted after the rescue operation. However, the judges did not fail to admit that the international rules on rescues at sea are outdated, since they do not contemplate, and should be changed.
The judges came to say that with the existing laws, although they considered them “incomplete” and “inadequate,” they had not been able to reach any other conclusion. The ruling stressed that the laws that regulate the rescue of migrants on the high seas are “40 years old” and “a geopolitical context completely different from the current one.” That is, “they do not contemplate the missions of private NGO ships (…) to make up for the inability of States and international organizations to manage migratory flows.”
The court did not fail to point out that it would be “desirable, and surely not postponeable any longer, given the magnitude of the current migratory flows, the adoption of a system of international rules aimed at imposing on States, in matters of rescue at sea and assistance to survivors, duties of cooperation and solidarity.” What’s more, he stressed that he absolved Salvini for the “vagueness” of international precepts, which did not impose any obligation on him to grant the ship a port. Open Arms.
