Six members of an Italian charity which rescues migrants in the Mediterranean Sea have gone on trial in Sicily, accused of aiding illegal immigration.<\/p>\n
The case centres around the Mare Jonio, a ship operated by Mediterranea Saving Humans (MSH), which took 27 migrants off a tanker in 2020 and brought them to Italy.<\/p>\n
The migrants had been stranded on the Danish vessel Maersk Etienne for over a month, with both Italy and Malta refusing to accept them.<\/p>\n
The defendants include the charity’s co-founder Luca Casarini, the ship’s captain and three crew members, including a doctor.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors allege the rescue was financially motivated, pointing to a \u20ac125,000 payment from Maersk to MSH months after the event.<\/p>\n
Maersk said in a statement in 2021 that the money had been intended to “cover some of the costs” that the rescue charity faced.<\/p>\n
“At no point” was financial compensation discussed during the operation, it stressed.<\/p>\n
Maersk also praised MSH for coming to the rescue, saying the tanker’s repeated calls for assistance had been ignored by authorities and the situation on board had become “dire from a humanitarian point of view”.<\/p>\n
MSH described the payment as a “transparent donation”.<\/p>\n
The defence team said the trial in Ragusa is the first of its kind in Italy.<\/p>\n
Previous attempts to prosecute crew members of rescue vessels have ended either before or during preliminary hearings.<\/p>\n
Defence lawyer Fabio Lanfranca said the team raised a series of technical objections at the first hearing.<\/p>\n
These mainly concerned the use of wiretaps of conversations involving “lawyers, journalists, bishops and even members of parliament”.<\/p>\n
Fellow lawyer Serena Romano said the team also questioned whether providing medical assistance could be defined as criminal.<\/p>\n
The next hearing is set for 13 January.<\/p>\n
The hard-right government of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni took office in 2022, vowing to cut the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.<\/p>\n
It has repeatedly clashed with rescue charities.<\/p>\n
Despite admitting that charity boats pick up only a small minority of arrivals, Italy has characterised them as a “pull factor” and has passed laws which work to reduce the time they spend at sea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Six members of an Italian charity which rescues migrants in the Mediterranean Sea have gone on trial in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":139563,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-139562","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-featured-news","11":"tag-featurednews","12":"tag-headlines","13":"tag-latest-news","14":"tag-latestnews","15":"tag-main-news","16":"tag-mainnews","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-top-stories","19":"tag-topstories","20":"tag-world","21":"tag-world-news","22":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}