ROME (AP) — A court in Sicily on Friday found Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini not guilty of illegally detaining 100 migrants aboard a humanitarian rescue ship in 2019 when he was interior minister.
The court in the city of Palermo dropped all charges against Salvini in connection with a 2019 incident when he refused to allow the migrants to leave the Open Arms rescue ship on Italy’s southernmost island of Lampedusa.
Rulings in Italy are not considered final until all appeals have been exhausted, a process that can take years.
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Salvini, now transport minister in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government, has always defended himself and said he was acting to protect Italy’s borders.
“Protecting our country’s borders from smugglers is not a crime,” the leader of the right-wing League party said shortly after the verdict. “This is a victory for the League and for Italy.”
Prime Minister Meloni also expressed her “great satisfaction,” saying in a statement that the verdict “shows how the accusations against Salvini were unfounded and surreal.”
Salvini had always stated that he had no intention of resigning in the event of a guilty verdict, but such an outcome would have dealt a major blow to Meloni’s government.
He has the strong support of the prime minister, other ministers and anti-migrant European lawmakers, as well as Elon Musk, who expressed his sympathy for the Italian leader in a post on the social media platform X.
During the 2019 standoff, some migrants threw themselves overboard in desperation as the captain pleaded for a safe haven nearby. The remaining 89 people on board were eventually allowed to disembark in Lampedusa by court order.
Salvini took a tough stance on migration as interior minister from 2018 to 2019 in the first government of former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. He refused permission for humanitarian rescue ships to dock and accused the groups that rescue migrants at sea of effectively encouraging smugglers.
