With yesterday’s decision of the Court of Cassation, the Mitterand doctrine has once again managed to teach Italy a lesson in law. And also to the French government, on which the Attorney General who presented an appeal against the decision of the Chambre de l’instruction of the Paris Court of Appeal who a year ago refused theextradition of ten Italian refugees. Who had been “selected” among the approximately two hundred Italian citizens convicted of acts of terrorism and sheltered in France in the seventies in the shadow of Mitterand doctrine which qualified his country as a land of asylum. These are nine former terrorists responsible for murder and George Pietrostefanito which the word of a single “repentant” attributed the role of principal, together with Adriano Sofri, of the murder of commissioner Luigi Calabresi.
In the 1972. Year nineteen seventy-two, and we are still talking about it, not as a tragic historical fact, but as a judicial matter. And here we are at a crucial point in history. Of this as of others. In France for example, only crimes against humanity, genocides, are never statute barred. It would therefore be impossible, according to that regime, to claim to carry out those sentences, to apply the penalties provided by the various Italian courts of assizes. But this whole story has the slightly bitter taste of political agreements between rulers who feel more bound by ties at home than by the need for justice. And after all, what kind of justice can ever be applied forty or fifty years after the facts? When the arrests and the President suddenly took place two years ago Macron he had sighed “The question is closed”, he had indirectly replied Adriano Sofri, ironically asking him “and now what do you do with it?”.
Yes, and Italy, if the French judges had allowed the extradition of these ten, what would Italy have done with them? In France, although the prosecution depends on the Minister Keeping the Seals, the judges are judges, and one must not think that they suffer any contamination from what the Italian togas consider blasphemy, the submission of the prosecutor to the executive. Precisely because they are independent, the judges of the Paris Court of Appeal a year ago they had issued a sentence that had been a real lesson in law. And the insistence of the French executive, with the minister Eric Dupond-Moretti pressed by it Marta Cartabia, which is also a theorist of “restorative justice”in presenting the appeal in cassation anyway, had seemed more like a political duty towards the Italian cousins.
There were two principles to which the judges had appealed to motivate the decision to deny the extradition, those envisaged by the articles 6 e 8 from the European Convention on Human Rights. The first is essentially that of habeas corpus, which visibly contrasts with absentia, the physical absence from the trial, a condition in which many of those accused of terrorism were judged. “Every person has the right to his cause -article 6 says- is examined fairly, publicly and within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal.”. Then follow i rights of the defendant, and the concept of “strength”, for which that of whoever is called to stand must be equivalent to that of the State that accuses him. Equality between the parties, that’s it. And the question: can an absentee, even if by his own choice, have the same strength as his accuser? And can the trial and the sentence that will follow from it be defined as “just”?
Here it is no longer just a matter of Mitterand doctrine and of right to asylum, but of the foundations of the rule of law, which cannot often allow to judge only on the basis of declarations of “repent” and ofapplication of crimes of association. Which is not to think they are all innocent. Paradoxically, this is not the most important thing. As for thearticle 8 from the convention, talk about the “right to respect for private and family life”, and it is clear how relevant the consideration of the fact that these ten Italians fully respected the pact stipulated with the French state was in arriving at that sentence. And for 40 years and more they have complied with the rules and laws, not only by not committing crimes, but by leading lives of exemplary French citizens.
What better forms of reintegration, such as the one envisaged by thearticle 27 ours Constitution? The minister should be pleased Nordic, who also inherited the hot potato from her predecessor. Instead he “takes note” of what he defines as “political obstacle which for decades has prevented the French judiciary from evaluating our requests”. Sorry to contradict that, because the Attorney General Eric Dupond-Moretti has been fully aligned with the position of the Italian government. But it was the Judges, the independent judges who chose the rules of the Rule of law. And also the right to be forgotten, to passing time, to changing people. Without this there would have been only revenge.