Open Arms says 'calm, never given up'

(ANSA) - ROME, OCT 18 - Spanish migrant rescue NGO Open Arms founder Oscar Camps said after a hearing in the trial of League leader and former anti-migrant interior minister Matteo Salvini for allegedly abducting migrants as part of his controversial closed ports policy in 2019 that the charity was "serene and we have never given up in our efforts to establish the truth".
    Palermo State attorneys last month asked for six years' imprisonment for current Deputy Premier and Transport Minister Salvini on charges of kidnapping and refusal to perform official acts for having prevented, five years ago, the disembarkation from the Open Arms of 147 migrants in Lampedusa.
    "Today, during the hearing of the trial of Matteo Salvini, the defense presented its interpretation of the facts," Camps told reporters outside the coutroom in the Sicilian capital.
    "We are calm: the Prosecutor's Office has our statements and its reconstruction fully corresponds to what we have always maintained.
    "In the meantime, we continue to see migration policies managed in an emotional way, such as the attempt to deport migrants to Albania, stopped by (the) justice (system," he went on, referring to a ruling by a Rome court negating the detention of the first 12 migrants to be taken for processing under an innovative and controversial scheme with Albania..
    "These practices do nothing but ignore fundamental human rights," said Campa.
    "Five years have passed since Mission 65, but we have never given up. We have fought to re-establish the truth and to ask for respect for human rights, constituting ourselves as civil parties. Now we await the final judgment". (ANSA).