Open Arms: for judges, Italy was not obliged to assign a safe harbour

The Italian state had no obligation to provide the Safe Harbor (Pos) to the ship Open Arms. the conclusion from which the reasoning that led the court of Palermo to acquit former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini of the charges of kidnapping and refusal of acts of office in the affair involving the Spanish NGO Open Arms. To the boat that had rescued a hundred migrants at sea in August 2019, the Viminale forbade, illegitimately according to the prosecution, to land the migrants rescued at sea. The prosecution had asked for the Carroccio secretary to be sentenced to six years. The judges filed the grounds for the sentence.

The conviction that, in the present case, no obligation to provide the Pos was incumbent on the Italian State, nor, therefore, on the defendant," the judges explained at the outset, "clearly exempts the panel from analytically addressing various issues put forward and animatedly debated by the parties, such as, for example, those relating to the circumstance that the ship Open Arms could have acted as Pos, or to the fact that the first intervention did not actually concern a vessel in distress, or even to the fact that the time spent waiting for the Pos could legitimately be explained (also taking into account the considerable ordinary landing times used in other rescue operations concluded in Italy, even at a different time from the Salvini regency of the Ministry of the Interior) with the need to first provide for the distribution of migrants among European States".

"The judges," says Matteo Salvini, "have confirmed that defending Italy is not a crime, noting the obstinacy and arrogance of Open Arms, which did everything to come to Italy, discarding all other alternatives that were more logical and natural. The satisfaction for the decision of the judges in Palermo does not erase the bitterness for a long trial that has cost thousands of euros to Italian taxpayers: it is the result of the political hatred of the left against me'.