(AP) Italy’s deputy premier, Matteo Salvini, has sounded defiant ahead of Friday’s court verdict in Sicily for blocking some 100 migrants at sea on a humanitarian rescue boat in 2019 when he was interior minister.
Salvini, who leads the Euroskeptic, anti-migrant League, told a rally last week that “defending the borders, the dignity, the laws, the honor of a country cannot ever be a crime.”
He has vowed to enter the court in Palermo with his “head held high” to hear a court’s verdict on whether he is guilty of illegally detaining the migrants aboard the Open Arms rescue ship in Italy’s southernmost island of Lampedusa for five days in August 2019. He is also charged with failing to fulfill his public duties.
