The Case
With the Iuventa seized, prosecutors, politicians, and police congratulated themselves on having their “mission accomplished.” The focus then shifted to defence teams, independent researchers, and journalists, who began testing the state’s narrative against the evidence.
At the centre of the prosecution’s case was a single core accusation: that the Iuventa crew had colluded with smugglers. The alleged evidence centred on three rescue operations conducted between 2016 and 2017, during which the crew were said to have arranged “appointments” with smugglers, accepted “deliveries” of migrants, and returned empty boats for reuse. The claims began to unravel as soon as they were subjected to serious scrutiny.
Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, conducted an extensive analysis of the events. Using spatial reconstructions, audio recordings, and visual tracking, the team demonstrated that the Iuventa crew had never deviated from standard rescue protocols.
The real scandal, it turned out, did not lie in the accusations themselves, but in what the state had done to manufacture them.
The investigation dragged on for nearly four years, officially targeting 10 of Iuventa's crew members. We used that time. We organised support networks across Europe and learned to shift our focus: from direct action at sea to meetings with lawyers, advocacy and media workshops, courthouse waiting rooms, and editorial offices. We understood what was at stake. A conviction would have sent a devastating signal far beyond our own case.
Together with our beloved "partners in crime," we built campaigns, organised publicly, and worked to expose the real crimes, naming what should have been on trial all along: European migration policy. The Paul Grünninger Prize and Amnesty International's Human Rights Award honoured the Iuventa10 — and with them, everyone targeted by the assault of criminalisation against solidarity across Europe.
On 11 January 2021, the prosecutor’s office in Trapani filed a 30,000-page dossier and formally charged 21 individuals and three organisations. Soon afterwards, the lead investigator, prosecutor Andrea Tarondo, disappeared from public view, leaving for South America to work on a “special project.” He never argued the case in court, never gave an interview, and never answered a single public question. But the documents he left behind revealed something far more serious than a baseless prosecution. They exposed one of the largest surveillance scandals in recent Italian history.
More than forty people were wiretapped. Not only Iuventa crew members, but also staff from MSF and Save the Children, journalists, lawyers, and priests. Even the psychologist’s office at MSF’s Trapani base was bugged. Conversations protected by journalistic confidentiality and attorney–client privilege were intercepted indiscriminately. Hidden microphones were planted aboard three rescue ships, while phones were infiltrated using spyware supplied by a Milan-based company later investigated by the European Parliament over allegations of unlawful surveillance practices.
Wiretaps were repeatedly renewed on the basis of vague suspicions – or simply the paranoid speculation of informants such as Pietro Gallo. Journalists, priests and human rights defenders were swept into the dragnet. What had begun as an anti-smuggling investigation gradually evolved into an open-ended campaign of surveillance targeting civil society actors.
Over time, journalists reconstructed what the court documents only partially revealed: this was not an isolated or rogue investigation, but part of a broader national strategy coordinated at the highest levels of Italy’s anti-Mafia and anti-terrorism apparatus, the Direzione Nazionale Antimafia e Antiterrorismo (DNAA). Prosecutors drew on the same legal powers and investigative tools once developed to combat organised crime in order to justify sweeping surveillance operations against sea-rescue organisations.
When we reached the courtroom...
More than forty hearing days were scheduled over the following three years. On average, one per month in Trapani. The preliminary hearings were largely grinding and procedural: disputes over defendants’ basic rights, the admissibility of trial observers and civil parties, questions of jurisdiction. Rarely did they touch on the actual accusations. Almost never on what was truly at stake.
Let's rethink the whole discipline!
In an effort to challenge that framework directly, we filed a constitutional complaint aimed at dismantling the legal architecture underpinning our case — and, more broadly, the growing criminalisation of solidarity and mutual aid among people on the move themselves. The complaint was rejected, but it helped lay the groundwork for one of the most significant legal challenges of recent years: the Kinsa case.
We refused to play the role of passive defendants. Instead, we used every tool available to expose what these proceedings produce — not only for us, but for everyone drawn into their orbit. We campaigned under #NoTranslationNoJustice, filed criminal complaints of our own, attended other trials in solidarity with fellow defendants, and joined petitions, actions, and mobilisations across Europe. The Iuventa crew became part of a wider landscape of resistance — connected through courtrooms, campaigns, and shared attempts to push back against the criminalisation of solidarity.
...the case collapsed entirely.
Whenever the hearings turned to the substance of the accusations — the sources, the facts, the evidence — the prosecution’s narrative began to unravel. In the final phase of the preliminary proceedings, when the judge had to decide whether there were sufficient grounds to proceed to trial at all, events moved quickly.
Much of the case had rested on the supposedly “reliable and trustworthy eyewitnesses” presented by the prosecution — the factor repeatedly described as setting the Iuventa case apart from the dozens of other investigations against search-and-rescue NGOs that either never reached court or were swiftly dismissed. The fact that these witnesses were former police officers, claiming to have acted out of a sense of duty, was meant to lend the accusations particular credibility.
In December 2023, the prosecution’s key witnesses — IMI employees Gallo, Montanino, and Ballestra — were finally questioned in court. Their testimony quickly disintegrated. They contradicted themselves, contradicted one another, and retreated from the very claims they had once made with certainty. What had long been presented as the prosecution’s greatest strength became its most damaging weakness.
I never witnessed the NGOs collaborating with the smugglers. That was always just a hunch. We put two and two together.
The undercover operation fared no better. In an effort to corroborate the allegations made by IMI’s employees in 2016, authorities placed an undercover agent known as “Luca Bracco” aboard Save the Children’s Vos Hestia. Posing as a firefighter, he was tasked with secretly photographing rescue crews and documenting their operations. His mission produced no evidence of wrongdoing. So he manufactured it. Images were mislabelled. Timestamps were altered. Yet what his camera captured — inadvertently and inconveniently — was something else entirely: Italy’s EU-funded Libyan partners intercepting migrant boats in international waters, removing their engines, and towing them back to Libya.
In spring 2024, the prosecution itself requested that the charges be dismissed. Seven years after the investigation began, cornered by the collapse of its own evidence, it had little choice left.
On 19 April 2024, the court concluded the hearing. The case was found to have no factual basis whatsoever:
The evidence presented speaks with absolute clarity and completeness for the absence of the criminal offences of which the defendants are accused.
That clarity did not emerge from the investigation. It emerged in spite of it. With the support of an extraordinary legal team, and years of unwavering solidarity from colleagues, activists and supporters, academics and researchers, and human rights organisations across Europe, we did what the prosecution never did: fully reconstruct the facts of the case, close every gap, and leave no room for the speculation and distortion on which it had been built.
In its final reasoning, the court went further, recognising the necessity and legitimacy of escape from Libyan detention camps and drawing a conclusion that was both important and long overdue: assistance to escape can be “indeed necessary.”
Escape from torture, arbitrary detention, sexual violence, mistreatment, sexual and labour exploitation, deprivation of basic human needs (food and medical care) is clearly indicative of the inevitability of escaping a situation of present danger of serious personal harm arising from being held in Libyan detention centres for migrant transits.
From this point of view, any behaviour that is materially capable of enabling migrants to enter Italy without an entry permit would indeed be necessary, as it serves to protect the fundamental interests of the person concerned and frees migrants in transit through Libya from the inhumane conditions in the detention camps.
Predictably, this news failed to generate anything close to the attention or outrage (let alone the political consequences) that followed the ship’s seizure and investigation. The images from that smear campaign remained burned into public consciousness. The damage was already done.
The proceedings consumed extraordinary amounts of energy and resources, all of which were unavailable to the ongoing struggles at the borders and at sea. The Iuventa still rusts in port. A judge who ordered its release later withdrew the ruling, declaring himself not competent and triggering yet another court proceeding. The crew spent years under the threat of prison. NGOs scaled back their operations. An entire generation of humanitarians and activists was placed under suspicion. Public opinion on search-and-rescue was irreversibly shaped. And thousands of people drowned at sea.
None has ever been held accountable for all this.
A Ministry of Justice review into the Trapani investigation was quietly shelved. The report was never released. The Minister informed Parliament that no wrongdoing had occurred: nothing to see here, move along.