Italy’s right-wing deputy prime minister has said he is “not afraid of being convicted” after prosecutors requested a six-year prison sentence against him for blocking migrants from disembarking at Lampedusa in 2019.
Matteo Salvini said he had no intention of “plea bargaining” and would appeal any conviction all the way to the Supreme Court.
As we reported on Sunday, Salvini is on trial for alleged “deprivation of liberty and abuse of office” for preventing the Open Arms ship, run by a Spanish NGO, from landing at the Italian port and “keeping 147 migrants at sea for weeks.” He was serving as interior minister at the time.
In an interview with chat show Quarta Repubblica, Salvini condemned prosecutors for putting him on trial just for doing his job. “There are paedophiles and rapists for whom the prosecution” has asked for a less harsh sentence, he said. He said he was “pissed off” because he “would have expected anything but to walk into court and risk six years in prison. Real prison.”
Salvini, leader of the League (La Lega) party, said the trial was “embarrassing” for Italy. It is a “political trial against me, against the League and against this government.” He added that it set a “dangerous precedent” that risks becoming an “aberrant notion that you cannot stop the landings,” even as many other European countries, including Germany and Britain, try to toughen their border policies.
A defiant Salvini declared
I would do it all over again. I had asked the citizens to vote for me to reduce the landings and I did.
He reiterated that the NGO had refused offers of going to ports in Tunisia, Malta, and Spain. “They wanted to come to Italy because it was a political choice,” he said.
I hope someone on the Left is ashamed. It is one thing to contest me in municipalities or regions, it is another thing to try to send me to jail because they cannot defeat me because the Italians trust me. It’s something embarrassing, I wouldn’t be able to do that.
Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni is sticking by her deputy and has also criticised the prosecutors. On Saturday, she wrote on X:
It is incredible that a minister of the Italian Republic risks 6 years in prison for doing his job defending the nation’s borders, as required by the mandate received from its citizens. Transforming into a crime the duty to protect the Italian borders from illegal immigration is a very serious precedent. My total solidarity with Minister Salvini.
