The Deputy Prosecutor of Palermo Marzia Sabella, at the end of the indictment of the Open Arms trial, which lasted approximately seven hours, asked for a six-year sentence for the minister Matteo Salvini, accused of kidnapping and refusal of official documents. “We are going to ask for the conviction of the accused”, explains Sabella, recalling the 147 migrants who were the offended parties in the trial, “as well as to defend the boundaries of the law…”, she said. “The voluntary and conscious refusal” of Matteo Salvini to grant port to migrants on the Open Arms “has affected the personal freedom of 147 people for no appreciable reason”, she said. “In this process the presence of the majority of the offended people was missing, because even to be able to be offended people you have to be born in the right part. Most are untraceable and this does not mean that they are criminals, but it means being homeless and without means” .
“Ministers Trenta and Toninelli and Prime Minister Conte decided to intervene in August 2019, the ministers not countersigning the interdictory decree, indeed Minister Trenta had taken care of the minors. Being allies does not mean being complicit”. Thus the deputy prosecutor of Palermo Marzia Sabella continued the indictment at the Open Arms trial against Matteo Salvini accused of kidnapping people and refusal of official documents.
“The point is that it is enough to examine the documents and not make hypotheses and theorems to realize that throughout the process there was the correctness of Salvini’s actions, the maximum attention to the health of the migrants. And that this delay (in the issuing of the pos) is minimum compared to what is recorded every day when migrants have to disembark”. Thus the lawyer Giulia Bongiorno, Matteo Salvini’s lawyer, comments with journalists on the request for 6 years of imprisonment for the deputy minister made by the prosecutors at the end of the requisition of the Open Arms trial.
“Turning the duty to protect the Italian borders from illegal immigration into a crime is a very serious precedent. My total solidarity with Minister Salvini”. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stated this on social media, commenting on the request for a conviction for the deputy prime minister in the Open Arms trial.
