Italy's supreme Cassation Court on Friday ruled in favour of an appeal filed by a group of migrants who were not allowed to disembark from the Italian coast guard's Diciotti vessel that had rescued them at sea on August 16-25 2018 as part of then-interior minister Matteo Salvini's closed-ports policy.
The appeal demanded that the Italian government compensate the refugees on the grounds that they had been deprived of their personal freedom.
The Cassation's panel of judges sent the case back to a regular court saying the tribunal will need to decide the amount of compensation to be granted to the migrants.
The coast guard ship picked up 190 migrants on August 16 2018 from an overcrowded boat off Lampedusa after they were refused entry to Malta.
Thirteen of them were taken to Lampedusa because of serious medical conditions but the remaining 177, mostly from Eritrea, remained stranded on the boat for 10 days.
Salvini was at the time probed for allegedly abducting the migrants on the ship.
However the Senate, of which Salvini was a member, rejected a request to investigate the former interior minister filed by the tribunal of ministers tasked with cases involving members of the executive.
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