After a seven-year legal battle, crew members of migrant rescue ships accused by Italy of collusion with human traffickers in the Mediterranean hope to finally get justice on Friday. A Sicilian magistrate must rule on a case involving the crews of several relief ships, including that of the Iuventa, run by the German NGO Jugend Rettet. In February, prosecutors requested that the case be dismissed, a request that the Trapani preliminary hearings judge is expected to follow on Friday, although he may also decide whether they should be sent to trial.
The lawyer for the Iuventa crew members, Francesca Cancellaro, said the seven years of investigation and preliminary hearings showed
"how pervasive the effects of the crystallization of solidarity can be
. "
The Iuventa, which was seized in 2017, remains
“abandoned, looted and largely demolished”
in the Sicilian port of Trapani, said the NGO, despite a decision by the Italian justice system in December 2022 aimed at having it restored to the fresh from Italy.
The affair was marked by the wiretapping of lawyers and journalists. Italian authorities began showing interest in NGOs in 2016, when the center-left government was grappling with a sharp increase in the number of migrants arriving on its shores. Some 181,000 migrants landed in Italy that year. It was a former police officer working as a security guard on the Save the Children ship Vos Hestia who first reported rumors that the NGOs were working with human traffickers.
Police placed an undercover agent on the ship, while investigators wiretapped NGO staff, lawyers and journalists, a move that sparked outrage when it became public. Prosecutions were finally initiated in 2021 against 21 people from the ships Iuventa, Vos Hestia and Vos Prudence, the latter two managed by Save the Children and Médecins sans frontières (MSF).
“Criminalization” of NGOs
After the case was split into several separate proceedings last year, ten crew members from the three ships remain involved in the case decided Friday. Save the Children, MSF and the shipping company which owned the two ships chartered by the two NGOs are also being prosecuted. Accused of having facilitated illegal immigration from Libya to Italy in 2016 and 2017, the defendants risk up to 20 years in prison. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have criticized Italy for its
“criminalization”
of migrant rescuers and violations of the defense rights of the accused.
When prosecutors recommended dismissing the case, Iuventa's team reported that they
"admitted that key witnesses lacked credibility and that there was no basis to charge"
the targeted crew members. But the already harsh stance towards NGOs was strengthened under the ultra-conservative government of Giorgia Meloni. Rome thus limited the activity of their ships to a single sea rescue at a time, forcing them to dock in an assigned, often distant, port. These rules have, according to NGOs, considerably reduced rescues.