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Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called Hungary’s leader Viktor Orbán on Tuesday night amid a worsening dispute over the treatment of a woman from Milan who could face up to 11 years in jail for her alleged role in a series of violent attacks.
Images of Ilaria Salis, a 39-year-old teacher, arriving at court in Budapest on Monday with her hands and feet in shackles provoked outrage in Italy, where even hardened Mafiosi on trial for multiple murders are rarely seen in chains. Several front page headlines proclaimed on Tuesday that she had been “treated like an animal”.
The case is a political headache for Meloni, who has been known for her long-standing warm relations with Orbán, and threatens to generate friction between the two leaders as they prepare for EU elections in June.
The Italian leader’s personal appeal to Orbán to intervene on behalf of Salis came after the Hungarian ambassador to Italy was summoned to the foreign ministry in Rome earlier in the day for a dressing down.
“An Italian in chains — tied hand and foot in Hungary,” Giuseppe Conte, leader of Italy’s opposition Five Star Movement, wrote in a social media post on Tuesday, ahead of the phone call. “Giorgia Meloni, we don’t care that Orbán is a dear friend of yours. We need to act with the utmost determination and raise our voices.”
Salis, who was allegedly involved in an international anti-fascist group, has been charged with grievous bodily harm and engaging in organised crime for allegedly helping to orchestrate violent assaults in Budapest in February last year.
The attacks took place in the wake of a far-right march through the Hungarian capital, after which alleged leftist militants, some using iron bars, attacked several people whom they suspected of being neo-Nazi sympathisers.
Her family and relatives say she has been held in inhumane prison conditions since her arrest last February.
“This is not Europe,” Carlo Calenda, an Italian opposition lawmaker, wrote on X, likening the images of Salis in court to the “shameful acts of South American dictatorships of the 1970s”. He demanded that the Italian government and Brussels protest.
The use of shackles is not unusual in Hungarian court proceedings.
Before Salis’ court appearance on Monday, Meloni’s government had not previously commented publicly on the case, and Salis’s family has expressed frustration with Rome’s lack of interest. But after the public outcry, Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, demanded that Salis’s “rights, as per EU standards, are respected while [she] awaits trial”.
Italy’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday that it had reminded the Hungarian ambassador of Budapest’s responsibility to protect “the dignity of those in prison”.
It also asked the Hungarian government to ensure the conditions of Salis’ detention were “in line with European legislation” and to consider the possibility of alternatives to prison, the statement said. Rome has suggested that Salis could be kept under house arrest until her trial.
Salis has rejected the charges against her. “I did not commit these crimes, I do not accept the accusations,” she told the court, according to local media.
Police released a video last year that shows eight attackers using metal rods, hammers and pepper spray, beating and kicking a man near a Budapest housing estate last February. After storming him from behind and assaulting him, the attackers quickly dispersed. Five similar attacks took place in the city within 48 hours.
The attacks coincided with a far-right commemoration of a second world war battle called the Breakout, when Wehrmacht soldiers and their Hungarian allies tried to escape through a 1945 Soviet blockade of Budapest.
Prosecutors said last year that it was plausible the suspects in the case arrived in Hungary “because of Breakout Day”. Two others have been charged alongside Salis. Police have issued international arrest warrants for a further 14, most of them German citizens.
Salis’s defence attorney György Magyar called the charges — with their potential 11-year maximum sentence — “wholly disproportionate” and said he would challenge them in court.
Salis and her co-defendants “took an ideological stand. It was a form of civil disobedience, not organised-crime violence”. Magyar said. “The charges against her are of being present at two of the locations, along with her peers. But our defendant denies she is at fault.”
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