Today, at least one of the migrants, an Eritrean man, who was on board the Italian coast guard ship, the Diciotti in August 2018, when it was blocked from disembarking those who had been rescued at sea by the then Italian government, is living in the United Kingdom.

He is one of a group of migrants who brought a legal case against the Italian government, saying that holding the group on board the ship and preventing them from disembarking was against their fundamental rights.

The ten-day blocade that occurred between August 16 and 26, 2018 was part of then interior minister, and head of the League (La Liga) party Matteo Salvini's so-called 'closed ports policy.'

"I only want justice", said the Eritrean migrant who was on board the Diciotti during the blocade, when asked to comment on last Friday's sentence from Italy's highest appeals court, the Court de Cassation, on the case. Being forced to stay on the ship, said the man, harmed his fundamental rights.

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'We were deprived of freedom and not allowed to apply for asylum'

"I wasn't interested in compensation but in ascertaining the responsibility of those who implemented those decisions: it was an injustice, they deprived us of our freedom and of the ability to ask for asylum without us having committed any crime", said the Eritrean migrant, assisted by the lawyer Alessandro Ferrara, when commenting on the decision of the supreme Court of Cassation.

The court ruled on Friday that the Italian government should pay the group compensation.

Matteo Salvini, currently Italy's deputy prime minister and transport minister, who at the time of the blocade was Italy's interior minister, called the court's verdict "disgraceful," and said it was another example of the judiciary intervening in the political field, a frequent accusation from right-wing politicians in Italy who accuse some judges of being too left-leaning.

Other members of the government criticized the sentence too.

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'Ignorance remains'

Alessandro Ferrara, the lawyer for the migrant commented that although he was "satisfied" with the verdict, he felt that reactions following the sentence showed that "studying in this country is useless, ignorance remains."

According to Ferrara, the Cassation's joint panel of judges "only reiterated consolidated principles."

In the 37-page-long sentence deliberation, where the judges reflect on the case and the reasons for their decisions, the supreme court judges wrote that it was important to rule out the possibilitiy that the refusal to authorized the migrants' disembarkation was "a political act subtracted from judicial control."

On this point, the attorney underlined that he felt the court's judges were "once again stating that a political act that harms fundamental human rights cannot be defined as such."

The lawyer mentioned his client's case in this respect: "If I am deprived of my personal freedom for 10 days because I can't disembark from a boat, I endure unfair damage which perpetrators must compensate," said Ferrara.

"There is nothing political here, because fundamental human rights are safeguarded regardless of citizenship, the color of skin and social background," he noted.

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Next steps

Ferrara was careful too about what the judges' decision would actually mean for his client, explaining that he didn't believe the judges' decision implies "immediate compensation" but "represents a mere referral to the appeals court of Rome".

The Cassation Court's ruling actually stipulated that a regular tribunal needed to determine the amount of compensation to be paid to the migrants, in this case Rome's appeals court.

Ferrara explained that, after the Cassation's ruling, either the group of migrants sends the case back to the appeals court within three months of the sentence's publication or the proceedings will be closed.