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Italy’s League party votes for Salvini to stand trial in migrant ‘kidnap’ case

The anti-immigrant League party has voted in favour of its leader Matteo Salvini standing trial for allegedly “kidnapping” migrants at sea, while the party's opponents abstained from the vote.

Published: 21 January 2020 09:16 CET

Italy's League party votes for Salvini to stand trial in migrant 'kidnap' case

League party leader Matteo Salvini at a rally with a banner reading "Proud Italian" Photo: AFP

An Italian senate committee voted on Monday to strip former interior minister Matteo Salvini of his parliamentary immunity, opening the way for him to stand trial for allegedly illegally detaining migrants last year.

Salvini, head of the right-wing populist League party, wrote on Facebook ahead of the vote that it would be “a trial against the Italian people”.

The ruling followed the recommendation by a court in Sicily that Salvini stand trial for blocking migrants on a coastguard boat last July.

Under Italian law ministers cannot be tried for actions taken in office unless a parliamentary committee gives the go-ahead.

Salvini called on League senators to vote in favour of the trial, “so we can clear this up once and for all”.

The League senators on the committee voted in favour of stripping Salvini's immunity, while those from the other right and centre-right opposition parties voted against.

Opponents in the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) and anti-establishment Five Star movement (M5S) boycotted the vote.

They accused Salvini of using the incident to win support ahead of a key regional election by portraying himself as a man hounded by the government and law courts merely for doing his job.

League party leader Matteo Salvini at a local election rally in Bologna. Photo: AFP

The final decision rests with the Senate, which will be called to give its opinion in a vote likely to be held in February, Italian media said.

Should Salvini go to trial, he faces up to 15 years in jail if found guilty.

Salvini had refused to allow 131 rescued migrants off the Gregoretti coastguard boat until a deal was reached with other European states to host them.

A court in Catania accused him of “abuse of power” in blocking those saved on board from July 27 to July 31.

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Salvini insists that was not an individual decision, but one backed by the government, includng current Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.

Prosecutors in Sicily opened a probe into conditions on board the boat, where migrants shared one toilet between them.

This is the second time the League leader has risked trial over detaining migrants.

Last year a court ruled that he should be tried for preventing 177 migrants from disembarking the Diciotti coastguard ship, but the senate voted to defend his parliamentary immunity.

The then-interior minister's “closed ports” policy, aimed at stopping migrant arrivals from war-torn Libya, saw his popularity numbers shoot up.

Italy has long complained it has been abandoned by Europe to deal with migrant arrivals alone.

“If I have to go to jail for defending an idea, I'll go with my head held high,” Salvini told a rally in the region of Emilia Romagna.

The region, a traditional stronghold of the left, goes to the polls on Sunday, pitting the ruling coalition parties – PD and M5S – against the League.

Salvini's anti-immigrant party has a strong lead in national polls, and is now betting on a victory in Emilia Romagna – where it is now polling neck and neck with the left-wing candidate – being damaging enough to bring down the government and trigger elections.

Salvini takes a selfie with Emilia-Romagna's regional candidate Lucia Borgonzoni at a rally in Bologna. Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP

Member comments

Anonymous - 21 January 2020 at 16:16 CET

Thank God Italy has Salvini!

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With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.