Salerno court annuls Geo Barents detention and rejects Libyan orders as rescue coordination

A civil court in southern Italy has ruled that an order from the Libyan coastguard telling a rescue ship to leave the scene of a shipwreck is not the kind of instruction a ship's master can be punished for ignoring. The Tribunal of Salerno, First Civil Section, sitting as a single judge, decided the case at a hearing on 20 March 2026 and issued judgment 1818/2026, which the Italian legal association ASGI published in redacted form. The judgment annuls a 60 day detention imposed on the search and rescue vessel Geo Barents, which then operated under charter to Medecins Sans Frontieres.

The facts are narrow. On 23 August 2024 the Norwegian flagged Geo Barents carried out five rescues in the central Mediterranean. On 26 August 2024, after survivors were landed at Salerno, the local port authority served record of assessment PVAC 76/2024 on the master and the shipowner. It alleged that the third rescue, logged as event 1595, had been carried out in the Libyan search and rescue region without conforming to the instructions of the Libyan Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre, using methods that helped create danger on board, and without timely notice to the Rome rescue coordination centre before operations began. The port authority attached detention order 39/2024, holding the ship for 60 days as a repeat offence penalty under article 1, paragraphs 2 bis (e) and (f) and 2 sexies of decree law 1 of 2 January 2023, converted with amendments by law 15 of 24 February 2023, the measure widely known as the Piantedosi decree.

The court found the administration had not proved its case. In proceedings opposing an administrative penalty the burden of proving the constituent facts falls on the authority that imposed it, under article 2697 of the civil code, a principle the judgment traces through Court of Cassation order 30148 of 22 November 2024. On the evidence filed, the judgment records that the Libyan authority stayed entirely inert in the face of repeated messages from the ship reporting a boat in distress and its intention to intervene, and that the administration never identified which instructions the ship had failed to follow. On the separate charge of failing to notify Rome, the judgment quotes the administration's own pleading, which says the Rome centre confined itself to taking note of the report.

Then the court went further than the evidence needed. Italian law, it held, penalises only departures from instructions about how a rescue is conducted, not instructions about whether to conduct one at all, citing a Crotone tribunal judgment of 26 June 2024. An order from the Libyan authority to move away could not be justified, the court said, because it conflicts with the absolute character of the duty of rescue owed by every ship's master under international law, a duty limited only where the operation cannot be carried out without endangering the ship, the crew or the passengers. Because the crew acted in performance of that duty, article 4 of law 689 of 1981, which excuses conduct carried out in the fulfilment of a duty, provided a second and independent ground for quashing the penalty.

The outcome is partial. The court struck out most of the respondent bodies, holding that only the Salerno port authority was properly sued, and dismissed the MSF Netherlands entity as charterer for want of standing. It annulled the assessment record and the detention order, ordered no damages, and compensated costs entirely between the parties, citing the complexity of the questions.

Those questions were shaped by the Constitutional Court, which on 8 July 2025 issued judgment 101 of 2025 and declined to strike down the detention regime referred to it by the Tribunal of Brindisi. Readings of that ruling diverge. Government supporters presented it as confirmation that administrative detention of rescue ships is lawful. SOS Mediterranee, which reported facing eight sets of proceedings over detentions and fines, argued the same judgment made the decree defensible only when read together with the law of the sea, and that masters owe obedience only to lawfully issued instructions. The Salerno judgment leans on the passage of 101 of 2025 saying no penalty may stand where the evidence of responsibility is insufficient.

The date itself is contested in the reporting. ASGI publishes the text as of 23 March 2026. MSF announced the result on 27 March 2026 in English, and Italian outlets, including MSF's own Italian site, carried it on 30 March 2026.

What remains unknown is whether the state will appeal, and whether other Italian courts will adopt the reasoning that an instruction to abandon a rescue is legally worthless. The Geo Barents is no longer there to test it. MSF ended the ship's operations in December 2024, after it rescued more than 12,600 people between June 2021 and November 2024, and after four detentions. It is also unclear what, if anything, the Rome coordination centre now does with a distress report beyond noting it.