Italian justice has dropped the charges against the German captain of the humanitarian ship after her arrest in June 2019 in the port of Lampedusa with 42 migrants on board.
“If we are not acquitted by a court, we will be in the history books”, told Carola Rackete in June 2019 at Spiegel, a few days before being arrested by the Italian authorities. The German captain of the Sea Watch 3, a humanitarian ship chartered by the NGO Sea Watch, which comes to the aid of migrants in the Mediterranean, then forced its way to dock in the small port of Lampedusa with 42 migrants rescued off Libya on board.
This had earned him legal proceedings instituted by the Italian justice system and the Minister of the Interior at the time, Matteo Salvini. The latter criticized him in particular for having attempted a dangerous maneuver against the customs cruiser which came to meet him to prevent him from dropping anchor. She faced up to ten years in prison for “Resistance or violence against a warship”.
But Thursday, the court of Agrigento, Sicily, definitively abandoned these proceedings, according to information from the specialized site. Infomigrants. “Carola Rackete acted in the fulfillment of the duty of rescue provided for by national and international law of the sea”, said Micaela Raimondo, the judge in charge of the case. She adds : “A ship at sea cannot be considered a safe place: in addition to being at the mercy of adverse meteorological events, it does not allow respect for the fundamental rights of those rescued.”
“Captain courage”
In the process, Carola Rackete split a statement posted on her Twitter account. Beyond his personal fate, the “Captain courage”, “Joan of Arc”, Where “Antigone“ as she was nicknamed in Europe where her supporters are numerous, insists in particular on the fact that the decision taken at the time by Matteo Salvini was “Against the norms”.
She also mentions the migration policy perpetrated by the EU in recent years, guilty according to her of an unacceptable security withdrawal: “In our modern history, the most serious human rights violations have not been perpetrated by individuals but by states. In recent years, the EU and its member states have spent millions to militarize the border, castigates the militant thirty-something. The European border protection agency Frontex is complicit in the forced return of thousands of victims of serious human rights violations in Libya. Illegal refoulements are perpetrated in Greece, Croatia and Poland. […] Therefore, we must confront the authorities of democratic states, and hold them accountable when they commit crimes and injustices. ”
The decision comes as Sea Watch announced on Saturday that it had rescued a total of more than 270 migrants in the central Mediterranean, as part of three rescue operations carried out since Friday by the Sea Watch 3. So on Friday morning they picked up 93 migrants who were in international waters south of the Italian island of Lampedusa.. Then the building assisted two inflatable boats in distress overnight and early in the morning on Christmas Saturday, the NGO announced on its Twitter account.