45-day detention for Sea Watch 5, Interior Ministry links German NGOs to Dublin returnees

On 23 August 2026 the Interior Ministry announced a forty-five-day administrative detention and a €7,500 fine against the Sea Watch 5, a ship flying the German flag moored in the port of Naples. The charge concerns failure to comply with the rules on coordination of search and rescue operations in the central Mediterranean (ANSA). The organisation has announced an appeal to obtain the release of the ship.

The newspaper has been following the border and transfer dossier for weeks: we wrote about it on 22 August, when the discussion revolved around European governments’ positions on returns. Today’s development shifts the ground from declarations to concrete measures: an administrative act against a private foreign vessel, adopted while negotiations with Berlin remain open.

Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi justified the line by arguing that activities at sea “must be managed and coordinated by the competent States, not by NGOs” (ANSA). The organisation rejects this account and maintains it did not contact the Libyan coordination centre, with a position summarised as follows: “We do not cooperate with criminals and traffickers” (Open). The two readings diverge on the point of law — who must be the mandatory interlocutor during a rescue in the waters off Libya — and the dispute will move before the administrative court with the announced appeal.

On the figures, sources report two separate tallies. According to data cited by the minister, in 2026 around 2,200 people were disembarked in Italy from ships belonging to German organisations, and over 22,000 from October 2022 to mid-August 2026 (L’Altravoce Il Quotidiano). The organisation, for its part, states that since 2023 civilian rescue ships have been detained 44 times for over 960 days in total, and that this is the eighth detention of the Sea Watch 5 during 2026 (La Milano). The two sets of figures come from opposing parties and neither has so far been verified by a third party: they should be read as partisan figures.

The political link is explicit. The Interior Ministry connects the transfer of asylum seekers under Italian responsibility with the arrivals produced by the German organisations’ ships, ahead of the bilateral meeting between Piantedosi and German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt scheduled for early September, a meeting that will focus precisely on Dublin returnees (L’Altravoce Il Quotidiano). This approach treats two legally separate matters — the European regulation on responsibility for asylum applications and the national rules on rescue operations — as items in a single negotiating balance sheet.

Berlin has not accepted this framing: the German Interior Ministry reiterated through its spokesperson that transfers to Italy will proceed (ANSA). Two concrete appointments therefore remain: the organisation’s appeal against the detention and the Piantedosi-Dobrindt meeting in early September.