Italy’s new Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi has vowed to ban migrant taxi NGOs from entering Italian waters, claiming the vessels used by the NGOs to ferry migrants to Italy operate outside of the limit of the law.
Piantedosi is said to be focusing on two NGOs and their vessels, the Ocean Viking, operated by the French NGO SOS Méditerranée and Humanity 1, which is operated by the German-based NGO SOS Humanity.
According to Minister Piantedosi, the two vessels are “not in line with the spirit of European and Italian rules on security and border control and the fight against illegal immigration,” stating the groups only informed authorities after they had picked up migrants, Il Giornale reports.
The two vessels fly the flags of Norway and Germany respectively. Working with Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, Piantedosi stated he would be contacting the two countries regarding the activity of the vessels in the Mediterranean.
“I wanted to strike a blow to reaffirm a principle: the responsibility of the flag states of a ship. Does this principle apply only to Italy and not to Germany and Norway?” Piantedosi said.
“Already this week we will have a Security Committee with the intelligence agencies. I want to understand the real situation in Libya and what can be done,” the Interior Minister said and added, “We cannot accept the principle that a state does not control the flows of those who enter.”
“Slowing down departures also means limiting deaths at sea, which are repugnant to me and which I see are almost no longer news,” he said.
Piantedosi was chosen by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to serve as Interior Minister as she formed her new centre-right government over the weekend and comes from a bureaucratic, rather than political, background.
However, he also served as the right-hand man to populist League leader Matteo Salvini when Salvini served as Interior Minister in 2018 and 2019 and greatly reduced illegal migrant arrivals and drowning deaths in the Mediterranean while banning migrant taxi NGOs for Italian waters under his security decrees.
On Wednesday, Salvini praised Piantedosi on Twitter, quoting the new Interior Minister and giving his applause to Piantadosi’s policy to stop migrant taxi NGO ships.
So far this year, over 77,000 migrants have reached Italy by sea and migrant taxi NGOs claim to have contributed to over 10,000 of the arrivals due to their activities in the Mediterranean and have been accused of working with people smugglers in the past.
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.
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