An Italian judge in Catania upheld Tuesday the seizure of Proactiva Open Arms ship, but dropped the most serious charges against the Spanish NGO that operates the ship, which is involvement in the smuggling of migrants.

The Italian media outlet ANSA reported that the judge ruled that the Proactiva Open Arms ship will remain under detention at the Sicilian port of Pozzallo, saying “he did not have the authority to make any further decisions.”

The judge added “there was a possible case for aiding illegal migration,” but rejected allegations of criminal association.

The case documents will be transferred to Ragusa prosecutors, ANSA quoted sources as saying.

Meanwhile, the operation officer at Proactiva Open Arms, Gerard Canals, said he is not afraid of jail with some reports claiming he, along with the captain of the ship, may face 15 year prison sentences and millions of euros in fines.

"I may go to prison but I am not really worried because we did nothing wrong," he told EUobserver online newspaper.

The ship was seized by Italian Coast Guard after landing in Pozzallo on March 18 with 215 illegal migrants on board. The ship refused to hand the migrants over to Libya Coast Guard.

You May Also Like: </s> Migrant rescue ship Proactiva Open Arms was seized and is now being held in the port of Pozzallo in southern Sicily, because its crew refused to hand over 218 refugees to the Libyan coastguard. Those helping migrants are often faced with criminal charges for facilitating illegal immigration. Is solidarity really a crime in Europe? </s> A judge ordered Italian authorities on Monday to release a migrant rescue ship belonging to the Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms, which was seized in Sicily last month.

Prosecutors sought to extend a confiscation order on the Open Arms ship for a second time, but were denied by an investigating judge in Ragusa.

The vessel had been confined to dock since March 18th, after prosecutors accused the charity of aiding illegal immigration in connection with a rescue operation that it carried out in international waters off Libya.

The charges have not been dropped, according to Proactiva's founder, Oscar Camps, who said that the Italian investigation continued. He welcomed the ship's release as "only a first step".

READ ALSO: Italy seizes NGO boat that refused to take migrants to Libya

Having gone to the aid of two vessels in difficulty and taken 218 people on board the Open Arms, Proactiva refused the Libyan coast guard's orders to hand over the migrants. According to the aid group, Libyan guards threatened to kill their crew if they did not surrender those rescued, who included women and children.

Instead the Spanish ship sailed for Sicily, in what Italian prosecutors allege was a deliberate plan to bring the migrants to Italy.

According to the Italian coast guard, international norms usually require ships to wait for their country of origin to arrange where migrants rescued at sea should be taken. The Open Arms sailed for Italy while still awaiting directions from the Spanish government and despite the fact that it was closer to Malta at the time, the coast guard said.

The group defended itself by saying that the Italian authorities had asked them to intervene in the first place and that forcibly returning migrants to Libya would have placed their lives in danger.

The group's supporters organized protests in Madrid and Barcelona and more than 300,000 people signed petitions calling for the ship's release, under the slogan: "Saving lives is not a crime."

READ ALSO: Spanish migrant rescuers hit out at Italian boat seizure



 "If saving lives is a crime, I'm a criminal": a protester in Madrid. Photo: Gabriel Bouys/AFP

Italy seized another rescue ship, the Iuventa, in August on similar allegations that the German NGO that operates it had facilitated illegal immigration.

The ship remains impounded in Lampedusa, despite the group's efforts to get it back. A new hearing is scheduled for April 23rd.

More than 600,000 migrants are believed to have reached Italy by boat in the past four years, though arrivals fell by 34 percent in 2017, according to the EU border agency.

The drop is largely attributed to an accord between Italy and Libya, which has seen the Libyan coast guard assume responsibility for a large part of rescue operations.

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, migrants face appalling conditions in Libya. A 22-year-old Eritrean, rescued at sea by the Open Arms ship last month after spending 18 months in detention in Libya, died from severe malnutrition just hours after landing in Sicily.

Last year around a dozen NGO ships patrolled the coast off Libya. Now there are only two such ships, with others suspending their operations following the drop in departures, as well as threats from Libya and the seizure of boats.
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• Italy closes Lampedusa migrant centre for renovation after conditions criticized </s> An Italian judge ordered yesterday the release of a Spanish non-governmental organization's (NGO) migrant rescue boat, which was impounded by prosecutors last month. The legal case is part of a wider political and legal clash between humanitarian NGOs and Italian authorities who wish to regulate and restrict the flow of migrants into the country.

The decision by Ragusa pre-trial judge Giovanni Giampiccolo was reported by Italian news agency ANSA and confirmed by a spokeswoman for the Spanish charity, Proactiva Open Arms.

"It is only a first step, and good news," the charity's founder Oscar Camps tweeted. He said that his organization remained under criminal investigation.

"We won a battle but I think that the legal war does not end today, it will continue and it will be long," Alessandro Gamberini, a lawyer for Proactiva Open Arms, was quoted as saying by ANSA.

Gamberini is defending Open Arms mission chief Ana Isabel Montes Mier, one of the two members of the Spanish NGO who are being investigated for abetting illegal migration.

As part of the same investigation, the Open Arms vessel was impounded on March 18, a day after it docked in Pozzallo, Sicily, with 216 rescued migrants it refused to hand over to the Libyan coastguard.

Catania Prosecutor Carmelo Zuccaro started a legal case against Proactiva because the NGO dodged Libyan orders and then took the migrants to Italy, rather than to the closer port of Malta.

The Spanish NGO insists it cannot allow people to be returned to Libya, where they risk torture and abuse. It also said the Libyans threatened to shoot at its personnel.

Zuccaro's office initially announced investigations against three Proactiva officials, but managed to identify only two. Three weeks ago, it was stripped of responsibility over the affair.

On March 27, another pre-trial judge dropped the more serious crime of criminal association against the two remaining Proactiva suspects, and moved the case from Catania to Ragusa, another Sicilian town.

German migrant rescue NGO Jugend Rettet is facing a similar legal ordeal. Its ship was impounded in August by other Sicilian prosecutors who suspected the group of abetting illegal migration. The charity is fighting to have the boat back, and Italy's top appeals body, the Court of Cassation, is due to rule on the case on April 23. "These are two different cases but [the decision of the Ragusa judge] makes us hopeful," Jugend Rettet spokesman Philipp Kuelker told dpa, stressing that no member of the NGO has so far been charged. </s> MADRID — An Italian judge has ordered Italy to release a Spanish aid group’s rescue ship that was impounded for taking 218 migrants to Italy, finding that the ship was operating in an emergency when it launched the rescue, the group said Monday.

Proactiva Open Arms said the ship was free to leave the Sicilian port of Pozzallo, but that prosecutors are still investigating whether its crew should face charges of criminal association and aiding illegal immigration.

Ragusa investigating magistrate Giovanni Giampiccolo recognized that the ship was acting under “a state of necessity” when it rescued the migrants off Libya’s coast and refused Libyan coast guard commands to turn them over, Proactiva lawyer Rosa Lo Faro said.

The magistrate ruled that international standards call for those rescued at sea to be brought somewhere “safe” — and that Libya was not safe, the ANSA news agency reported.

The investigation stems from a tense high-seas standoff last month between the Open Arms crew and the Libyan coast guard. The group refused to hand over the migrants they had picked up in international waters and took them to Italy, where the ship was immediately impounded.

“At all times, we acted according to existing international norms and laws created to protect human lives at sea and the rights of those rescued,” Open Arms said.

Amid a surge in anti-immigrant sentiment across Europe, Italy has been working to stem the tide of migrants leaving lawless Libya and arriving in Italy. It has helped the Libyan coast guard beef up its patrols, reduced the number of aid groups performing sea rescues and — in a move criticized by some aid groups — negotiated deals with Libyan militias that had long profited from trafficking humans.

The strategy has resulted in a 75 per cent drop in the number of migrants arriving in Italy in the first three months of 2018, to some 6,100, according to Interior Ministry figures. </s> Catania, March 27 - A migrant search-and-rescue ship run by Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms is set to remain under sequester at the Sicilian port of Pozzallo, a judge in Catania ruled on Tuesday. The vessel was sequestered after landing in Pozzallo on March 18 having saved 215 migrants in the southern Mediterranean. The preliminary investigations judge upheld the prosecutors' request for the ship to remain confiscated. But he said he did not have the authority to make any further decisions, having rejected allegations of criminal association but saying there was a possible case for aiding illegal migration. The case documents will be transferred to Ragusa prosecutors, the sources said. </s> Italian authorities have released a migrant-rescue boat that has been impounded for almost a month but are still investigating two of its crew on suspicion of enabling illegal immigration.



The Open Arms – which is operated by the Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms and has rescued more than 5,000 people from the Mediterranean over the past three years – was seized on 19 March after it docked in the Sicilian port of Pozzallo with 218 migrants onboard.

Its crew had rescued them from a leaky raft off the coast of Libya and refused to hand them over to the Libyan coastguard, arguing that they were in international waters.

Despite reportedly being threatened with being shot, the captain of the Open Arms said he could not release them into Libyan custody because of the risk of abuse and human rights violations they could face in the North African country.

The vessel was impounded and three crew members placed under investigation. The chief prosecutor of Catania, Carmelo Zuccaro, has accused them of enabling illegal immigration by refusing to hand the migrants over to the Libyan coastguards.

On Monday, a judge ordered the Open Arms to be released. However, Prosecutors are still looking into whether its captain, Marc Reig, and the mission’s coordinator, Anabel Montes, should face trial on charges of enabling illegal immigration.

Riccardo Gatti, the head of the Open Arms mission, confirmed that the ship had been released but said it had been damaged by bad weather during its confiscation and would not be able to return to sea immediately.

“We are finally free and this is a first, important step,” he told the Guardian. “But the fight is still long. Our captain is still [facing charges] of enabling illegal immigration and the prosecutors in Catania are continuing with their investigations against NGOs, criminalising people who saves lives.”

Gatti said the ship’s condition meant the NGO would have to look for another vessel but was sending its sailing boat, the Astral, into the save-and-rescue zone to continue operations.

Prosecutors declined to comment, but have shelved investigations into allegations that the crew of the Open Arms was involved in “criminal association” and had been conspiring with smugglers in smuggle migrants to Europe.

The case comes amid growing concerns that NGOs are being criminalised for trying to save lives in the Mediterranean.

In August last year, Italian police seized a rescue ship operated by German NGO Jugend Rettet as part of an Italian attempt to end the migrant and refugee crisis.

Meanwhile, Helena Maleno, a Spanish journalist and human rights activist who is thought to have saved hundreds of lives by alerting maritime authorities to the plight of vulnerable migrants in the Mediterranean, has appeared in court in Morocco over allegations that she has been colluding with people traffickers.

Human Rights Watch has hit out at such draconian responses. “It is shocking that Europe has reached the point of criminalising rescue at sea,” it said in a statement last month.

“Europeans should support, not smear, people saving lives in the Mediterranean, and remember that EU and Italian policies are propping up a cycle of detention and violence in Libya, while groups like Proactiva are saving lives.”

According to figures from the International Organization for Migration, 16,847 migrants and refugees have reached Europe by sea so far this year and 557 people have died in the attempt. </s> The Spanish group whose migrant rescue boat has been impounded by the Italian authorities hit out Thursday at what it called a deliberate campaign to ensure there were no independent witnesses to how refugees are treated while trying to flee from Libya to Italy.

"Proactiva Open Arms is the new target of a clear institutional, political and media campaign that wants to keep away witnesses who could denounce human rights violations in the Mediterranean," founder Oscar Camps told a news conference.

The Proactiva Open Arms group, which has saved more than 5,000 migrants since the start of 2017, had its boat impounded at the port of Pozzallo in Sicily, where it arrived on Saturday with more than 200 people rescued off the coast of Libya.

The non governmental group had refused to hand the migrants over to the Libyan coastguard, despite warnings from Rome and what the NGO claimed were death threats from the Libyans.

The prosecutor's office in Catania in eastern Sicily has opened an investigation into the NGO and three of its leaders for criminal conspiracy to promote illegal immigration.

Nevertheless, Camps argued that returning the migrants to Libya, where the situation is chaotic and human rights violations are common, "would mean sending them back to the hell they have fled."

The NGO's legal adviser, Jaime Rodrigo, an expert in marine law, said the legal justification for impounding the boat was "non-existant".

"It is possible that the boat will be held for a very long time, because the seizure can last as long as the procedure, and we know how long the procedures are," he said.

The boat is currently the NGO's only craft in operation and its seizure means Proactiva Open Arms, which is facing financial difficulties, cannot carry out any more rescue operations.

"We are flies and they're using cannons to fire at us," Camps said, calling for private donations and support from institutions.

Italy is the main entry point for migrants arriving in Europe across the Mediterranean.

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), as of March 25, more than 6,100 migrants had reached Italian shores since the beginning of the year and 359 have died.

In 2017, the number of arrivals in Italy was close to 22,000, with 727 deaths. </s> (ANSA) - Ragusa, April 16 - A preliminary investigations judge in the Sicilian city of Ragusa on Monday ordered the release of a migrant search-and-rescue ship run by Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms, rejecting a request from local prosecutors for it to stay under sequester.

The vessel has been berthed in the port of Pozzallo since landing there on March 18 having saved 218 migrants in the southern Mediterranean.

It was sequestered upon an order by Catania prosecutors in relation to a probe into possible case of aiding illegal migration.

The ship landed in Pozzallo after the NGO refused to hand the asylum seekers it was carrying over to the Libyan authorities. A Catania judge extended the sequester on March 27 but transferred the case to Ragusa, having rejected allegations of criminal association.
A judge in Catania, Italy, upholds the seizure of a Proactiva Open Arms ship that brought migrants to Sicily after refusing to hand them over to the Libyan Coast Guard.