Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Salvini faces sentencing in migrant lifeboat hijacking case

Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini arrives in court ahead of his sentencing on kidnapping and dereliction of duty charges for refusing to allow a migrant rescue boat to dock in Italy in 2019.

Prosecutors in Sicily asked the judges to sentence him to six years in prison.

Salvini, who is the leader of the right-wing League party and a government ally of Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, has already said he will appeal if found guilty.

He has denied the allegations, repeatedly claiming the judges were “political” and claiming his only fault was wanting to “protect Italy”.

Arriving in court on Friday, he said it was a great day “because I’m proud to have defended my country”.

One of the prosecutors, Jerry Ferraro, told the court in September that human rights should prevail over “the protection of state sovereignty.”

“A person stranded at sea must be rescued and it doesn’t matter if they are classified as a migrant, a crew member or a passenger,” she said.

The NGO ship Open Arms was carrying 147 migrants picked up off the coast of Libya when it was not docked at the Italian island of Lampedusa on the orders of Salvini, then the interior minister.

Open Arms remained at sea for almost three weeks, and the health of the migrants on board seriously deteriorated.

In the end, the prosecutor of the Sicilian city of Agrigento, Luigi Patronaggio, ordered the preventive seizure of the vessel after inspecting it and noting the “difficult situation on board”.

Salvini claimed that the then government of Giuseppe Conte fully supported him in his mission to “close the ports” of Italy to NGO rescue ships.

Prime Minister Georgia Maloney has backed her deputy prime minister, saying he has the “solidarity” of her and her government.

“Turning the duty to protect Italy’s borders against illegal immigration into a crime is a very serious precedent,” she wrote on X earlier this year.

She has never indicated that she would expect him to resign in the event of a conviction, and Salvini, for his part, has said he will not resign.

In recent months, he has frequently mentioned the trial and the upcoming verdict in social media posts, public appearances and interviews.

“I want to believe that Italy is a normal country and in a normal country whoever defends the borders is not found guilty,” he told Italian media earlier this week. If that were the case, he said, “it would be terrible news for the country and cause for celebration for people smugglers and enemies of Italy.”

He also claimed that Italy’s judicial system was “politicized” and that some magistrates were “obviously left-wing.”

Ellie Schlein, leader of the center-left opposition Democratic Party, accused Salvini of “spreading propaganda and fomenting a serious institutional clash.”

The three female prosecutors in the case have been under police protection since September after online harassment and threats.

Members of Salvini’s “Lego” party have gathered around him and are preparing demonstrations in his support.

On Wednesday, Lega MEPs appeared at a session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg wearing T-shirts that read “Guilty to defend Italy” – a slogan Salvini has used in the past.

“A condemnation would be an incredibly serious matter,” Lega deputy secretary Andrea Crippa said: “It would be a condemnation of the entire Italian people, the Italian parliament and the elected government.”

The president of the League party in Lombardy, Attilio Fontana, said a guilty verdict would be “so abnormal, even from a judicial point of view, that I don’t even want to think about it.”

Others outside Italy also entered the discussion.

“This crazy prosecutor should be the one to go to jail for six years,” Elon Musk tweeted, while Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Salvini, called the trial “disgraceful.”

If found guilty, Salvini said he would appeal the verdict “all the way to the Supreme Court of Cassation,” Italy’s highest court.

This process could take months, and it will not affect Salvini’s position in the government and parliament.