Open arms, how the case came about, what Salvini risks and the next steps

Six years imprisonment: this is the prosecution's request made by the Palermo Public Prosecutor's Office against the deputy prime minister and minister of Infrastructure and Transport, Matteo Salvini on 14 September 2024, exactly two years after the start of the trial against him. The League leader is accused of unlawfully denying, in August 2019, the Spanish NGO Open Arms' ship to land 147 refugees rescued at sea in the port of Lampedusa. Charges that are not new for Salvini, who has already been charged in Catania for a similar affair (the Gregoretti case), which had, however, ended with a non-suit.

The Opem Arms ship remained stationary for 20 days in front of Lampedusa. It was the magistrates of Agrigento, following an inspection on board by the then Prosecutor Luigi Patronaggio, who ordered the emergency disembarkation of the refugees exhausted by the heat and the sea crossing. The file was forwarded to the Palermo Public Prosecutor's Office, the investigating office of the capital where the Ministers' Court is based, which is competent because criminal responsibilities of the then Viminale chief Salvini were hypothesised.

In November 2019, the Ministers' Court received a request from the prosecutors to proceed with preliminary investigations against the League leader. In February 2020, the panel decided to ask the Senate for authorisation to proceed. In the order, with which the court substantially accepted the reconstruction of the prosecutors, the judges affirmed the principle of the obligation to provide aid at sea and defined as 'administrative' and not political the act of prohibiting the landing of migrants ordered by Salvini. According to the magistrates, the decision not to let the rescued refugees land in Lampedusa was, in short, an act decided by the then Minister of the Interior individually, and therefore not 'shared' with the other members of the government, as the League leader has always maintained.

On 26 May 2020, the Senate Committee on Immunities rejected the request, but on 30 July the chamber, with 149 yes and 141 votes against, granted authorisation for the former minister to proceed and sent Salvini to trial. After the green light from Palazzo Madama, the ball returned to the Palermo Public Prosecutor's Office, which called for the indictment of the League leader. Salvini's defence, with lawyer Giulia Bongiorno, asked instead for the case not to proceed because the fact does not exist or, in the alternative, because the fact does not exist.

But the Gup Lorenzo Iannelli accepted the prosecution's argument and set 15 September 2021 as the first hearing of the trial, A trial that went on for two years, during which leading politicians such as former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, former Foreign Minister Giuseppe Di Maio or current Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, The court had also admitted the testimony of Richard Gere, who had boarded the ship to see for himself the conditions of the migrants, but the American actor had had to give up because he was busy on the set of a film.