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He Supreme Court of Italy confirmed this Wednesday the absolution of the country’s vice president and leader of La Liga, the far-right Matteo Salvini, by rejecting the appeal that asked to review the sentence by eThe 2019 blockade of the disembarkation of migrants rescued in the Mediterranean by the Spanish NGO Open Arms, cWhen he was Minister of the Interior.
The decision of the High Court was announced after a long day of statements and deliberations, in a hearing that was attended by the founder and director of the Spanish NGO, Oscar Campsand the organization’s lawyers, while Salvini did not go to Court, where he was represented by his lawyer Giulia Bongiorno.
This Wednesday’s session had originally been called for last December 11, but was postponed due to the indisposition of Salvini’s lawyer.
The Italian Supreme Court had taken up this case almost a year after, on December 20, 2024, Salvini was acquitted by the Palermo Court. a even though the Prosecutor’s Office asked to sentence him to 6 years of jail.
But last July the Palermo Prosecutor’s Office, after having seen its request for a conviction ignored in the first instance, decided to present an appeal directly to the Supreme Court, bypassing the Court of Appeal, a decision provided for by law but very unusual.
The events date back to August 2019, when Salvini, then Minister of the Interior, prevented the disembarkation of 147 immigrants for 20 days rescued by the Open Arms ship.
This NGO put Salvini in the dock, butor was he acquitted because the Italian State “had no duty” to offer a safe port to the humanitarian shipas justified by the court.
The minister’s lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, defended upon leaving the Supreme Court that the process against Salvini “should not have even started” and that the prosecutor’s appeal was “totally crazy” because it did not meet the necessary requirements to be admitted.
Furthermore, he stressed that Open Arms “is the typical example in which the ship had many alternatives”so “waiting by free choice for a ship is certainly not a crime.”