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The appointment of a new right wing cabinet in Italy has caused non-governmental search and rescue organizations once again to be condemned as a supposed pull factor encouraging undocumented migration, and to be subjected to new restrictions on their activities. The attempt to restrict non-governmental sea rescue is, however, far from new. This article describes the evolution of this criminalization process by comparing the policies enacted under four different Italian Interior ministers: Marco Minniti, Matteo Salvini, Luciana Lamorgese and Matteo Piantedosi. We argue that, although important analogies can be found in Salvini’s and Piantedosi’s political discourses, the latest Interior minister has departed from Salvini’s confrontational but ultimately unsuccessful ‘closed ports’ policy by strategically developing some of the subtler tactics adopted by Minniti and Lamorgese. These include, for instance, the imposition of burdensome requirements on organizations rescuing and disembarking migrants and the use of administrative rather than criminal legal instruments to impound ships. As they are less likely to face judicial review and/or cause political backlash than direct criminalization, these indirect hindrances provide more viable avenues for restricting NGOs, but also threaten dire humanitarian consequences, exacerbating the gap in rescue capabilities off the Libyan coast.

Varieties of criminalization: Italy’s evolving approach to policing sea rescue NGOs