After three years of court proceedings involving 24 hearings and the testimony of 45 witnesses, the heavily publicised trial of Italy’s deputy prime minister and right-wing Lega leader Matteo Salvini reached its conclusion last month.
Salvini, who faced a possible six-year sentence, was cleared of charges of kidnapping and dereliction of duty.
The case goes back to the time of the fragile first Giuseppe Conte populist government that was officially sworn in on June 1, 2018, when Salvini took office as deputy prime minister and interior minister and declared the closure of Italian ports to rescue ships carrying migrants that crossed into Italian territorial waters.
Salvini penned controversial and xenophobic anti-immigration laws that the mayors of large Italian cities like Palermo, Naples and Florence refused to obey and condemned as not being in line with the Italian constitution.
Italy’s cabinet often had to intervene to soften Salvini’s laws.
Florence mayor Dario Nardella declared: “Salvini has a stone instead of heart.”
Salvini’s court proceedings stem from an incident dating back to August 2019 when he prevented the disembarkation of 147 migrants, including minors, who had been rescued by the NGO Open Arms in the Mediterranean.
This incident led to a 19-day standoff during which the migrants and 22 crew members were left stranded at sea as they faced a heatwave and an outbreak of scabies. Sanitarian conditions deteriorated rapidly and a humanitarian crisis developed with migrants throwing themselves overboard in desperation.
The ship captain refused to dock at Tripoli knowing that the migrants would most likely be imprisoned and tortured.
As cases requiring urgent medical attention developed, the captain maneuvered the ship into a blocked port in Lampedusa in defiance of Salvini. He was consequently arrested by the Italian authorities and faced a penalty of 10 years imprisonment. A judge, however, ruled that he had broken no law and acted to protect the lives of the passengers on board.
Salvini’s decision to prevent the ship from docking was overturned by the court that ordered the disembarkation of minors and those in urgent medical need, while a criminal investigation was opened into Salvini’s role.
Salvini’s eventual acquittal has tipped the scales in favour of border security at the expense of protection of human rights. It placed him in a stronger position to push his hardline anti-immigration policies while boosting his standing within the current centre-right populist government led by Brothers of Italy, which rose to power by riding a wave of public hostility to immigration.
The Maltese government adopted a similar populist stance towards migration through delays in providing assistance to people at risk of drowning in Malta’s search and rescue zone and refusal to allow them to disembark.
In what has been widely reported as the ‘Easter Monday pushback’, the Maltese authorities delayed a rescue operation of 63 migrants, including seven women and three children, who had fled from Libya on April 9, 2020 on a precarious rubber boat.
Distress calls remained unanswered as the boat sailed Maltese waters on Easter Sunday, April 12, with water leaking in and no drinking water on board. By the time a patrol boat of the Armed Forces of Malta reached the migrants, five of them were dead while another seven had gone missing at sea.
Matteo Salvini’s eventual acquittal tipped the scales in favour of border security at the expense of human rights- Denis Tanti
The surviving migrants were picked up by a Libyan-flagged fishing boat and forcefully returned to Tripoli on April 15 by means of a pushback coordinated by the Maltese authorities. Upon repatriation, they were locked away in the inhumane Tarik Al Sikka detention camp in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Maltese government justified its withholding of assistance to the migrants and refusal to allow them to disembark by the alibi that the country needed to contain its resources on the COVID-19 outbreak. Yet, the spring hunting season was allowed to run unhindered between April 10 and 30 despite the need to deploy several law enforcement personnel to carry out inspections over more than 6,000 hunters, when they could have been more usefully engaged in providing humanitarian aid to people in distress.
Like Salvini, in Malta, Prime Minister Robert Abela tried to gain political mileage out of a tragedy through an exercise in authoritarian populism intended to instil anger and fear in the Maltese population.
Abela shamelessly depicted NGO Repubblika as an enemy of the nation by accusing it of undermining the government’s efforts to prevent the coronavirus from spreading in the country for speaking out on behalf of the voiceless migrants who perished at sea.
The NGO had filed a criminal complaint for voluntary homicide against him and former AFM commander, Brigadier Jeffrey Curmi.
Abela fuelled the anti-immigrant sentiment of the Maltese people whose life has been negatively impacted by the uncontrolled importation of foreign workers who, at the time,made up 26% of the total local workforce.
Unlike Salvini, who faced a complex and lengthy trial with a prison sentence hanging over his head, Abela and Curmi were let off the hook through the speedy conclusion of an inquiry into the migrants’ death based on the narrow parameters of a report filed by the police commissioner that was concluded within a month.
The homicide allegations were dismissed without the magistrate hearing the testimony of the 51 surviving migrants. The inquiry left many questions unanswered, such as the cause of death of the 12 perished migrants and the chain of responsibility for the transfer of the 51 survivors to Tripoli.
Abela learnt his lesson and was more cautious in dealing with the next group of 57 migrants picked up in Malta’s search and rescue zone that same month. This time there were no pushbacks.
However, the government adopted a belligerent approach by unlawfully detaining these migrants for weeks on end on board a pleasure cruise ship positioned outside Maltese territorial waters, that was rented by direct order from the Captain Morgan company belonging to the affluent Zammit Tabona family.
Soon, the number of rented Captain Morgan ships rose to four to house more rescued migrants as Abela ignored an EU direction to allow the migrants to disembark before proceeding with discussions regarding their relocation.
While the taxpayer paid for the rent, the migrants celebrated aboard as they chanted “Viva l-Labour”.
Abela eventually made another of his U-turns and allowed the migrants to disembark but not before hundreds of thousands of euros had been raked in.
Denis Tanti is a former assistant director at the health ministry.