In December last year, a court of first instance in the Sicilian city of Palermo ruled that League leader Salvini had no case to answer in relation to charges of kidnapping and refusal to perform public acts for halting the disembarkation of 147 migrants rescued by the Spanish NGO Open Arms vessel in August 2019 as part of his closed-ports policy when he was interior minister.

Italy’s supreme Cassation Court is set to rule on the Open Arms case in which Deputy Premier and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League party, faces charges of kidnapping and refusal to perform public acts for halting the disembarkation of 147 migrants rescued by the Spanish NGO Open Arms vessel in August 2019 as part of his closed-ports policy when he was interior minister.

After Salvini’s acquittal last December by a Palermo court of first instance and the publication of the sentence's motivation,  the prosecutor's office said it had filed an 'per saltum' petition, which makes it possible to appeal directly to the supreme court without going through the appeals-court phase. The Cassation is Italy’s highest appeals court.

Prosecutors had requested a six-year jail term for Salvini, who was accused of illegitimately denying the disembarkation of the migrants on Lampedusa for nearly three weeks as part of his controversial policy to curb irregular arrivals when he was interior minister.

The State attorneys contended that, in doing so, Salvini had violated national and international law and had exceeded his powers when national security was not at stake.

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'Clearly someone is not resigned', says Salvini

Salvini said he was confident the acquittal would be upheld, expressing surprise and anger following the appeal. "I went through more than 30 hearings. The court acquitted me because there was no felony, recognizing that defending borders is not a crime," he said. "Evidently, someone is not resigned to this -- let's move on: I'm not worried."

"I don’t think there is any clash between the political (world) and the judiciary on the Open Arms" case and "in fact I thank the court of Palermo and I back all the 268 pages motivating my acquittal, which came after dozens of hearings and years of inquiries," the minister also noted.

The trial, he added, "was born in Parliament, it is a political trial because the Left, which had the majority" during the second government of then-premier Giuseppe Conte, "decided that blocking landings was a crime while it wasn’t either before or after."

Conte's first government, which lasted from June 2018 until August 2019, was backed by the 5-Star Movement (M5S) and Salvini's right-wing League party. Conte's second executive,  an unprecedented alliance between his anti-establishment 5-Star Movement (M5S) and the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), lasted until February 2021.

Read AlsoOpen Arms blockade: How Italy's Deputy PM came to be charged with migrant kidnapping

Why prosecutors chose to directly appeal to Cassation Court

Prosecutors in Palermo chose to appeal directly to the Cassation Court based on the fact that Salvini’s disputed conduct had already been acknowledged by the court of first instance in spite of the acquittal, making a challenge on the merits before an appeals court superfluous. Instead, State attorneys claimed the first-instance verdict had erroneously interpreted international laws and conventions, denying that Italy had the duty to assign a safe port to the Spanish NGO-run vessel.

This key point, allegedly based on the wrong interpretation of international laws, according to the Palermo prosecutors, led the court of first instance to determine that there was no case to answer on the charges of refusal to perform public acts and kidnapping.

The State Attorney’s Office instead claimed Salvini had violated international maritime rescue rules and was guilty of kidnapping, urging Cassation judges to assess whether these actions constituted a crime. The prosecutors' move was unusual as first-instance verdicts are usually challenged before an appeals court before reaching the Cassation Court.

The previous case of the Diciotti vessel

Technically, the 'per saltum' petition filed by the Palermo prosecutors makes it possible to appeal directly to the supreme court without going through the appeals-court phase. In the petition, prosecutors said that the Palermo court of first instance "fully backed" the public prosecution’s "reconstruction of facts", while differing from the prosecution’s thesis "only on the identification and interpretation of the legislation that could be applied to the case."

In particular, State attorneys cited the precedent of a ruling issued by the civil joint chambers of the Cassation Court on February 18 this year, which convicted the Interior Ministry in a similar case regarding the Italian coast guard’s Diciotti vessel.

Read AlsoItaly: One of the migrant plaintifs in the Diciotti case says he is looking for 'justice, not money'

In the case, the Cassation Court ruled in favour of an appeal filed by a group of migrants who were not allowed to disembark from the Diciotti ship that had rescued them at sea on August 16-25, 2018, as part of then-interior minister Matteo Salvini's closed-ports policy. The appeal demanded that the Italian government compensate the refugees on the grounds that they had been deprived of their personal freedom.

In the Diciotti case, prosecutors wrote, the Cassation's panel of judges "substantially established that the refusal" to allow the disembarkation of migrants, "far from being justified" by search and rescue procedures, "was not only in contrast with the clear international law on sea rescue (operations) which, in any case, is based on the general and cogent obligation to rescue and on the duty of collaboration and solidarity between States, but in particular violated article 13 of the Constitution" regarding the inviolability of personal freedom and "other supranational laws that safeguard the same legal asset."

"As a consequence, it was stated that the migrants were undoubtedly arbitrarily deprived of their personal freedom and that, actually, the decision on the merits, which was not based on such dispositions of superior ranking, had to be considered devoid of real motivation," the prosecutors concluded.

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