Decision of the Judge for preliminary hearings of the Court of Palermo No. 4114 of 7 September 2016

The case concerned two persons indicted for the offenses of murder and migrant smuggling for having conducted more than one hundred migrants to Italian territorial waters on a boat in very bad conditions and completely inadequate. Based on the evidence that they had been forced to this conduct by threat and violence by a group of Libyan migrants smugglers, the Judge for preliminary hearings of the Court in Palermo acquitted them for acting in state of necessity.