Cuno Tarfusser’s voice comes from Amsterdam, where he is spending a few days on vacation. Â «I find it unfortunate to say the least that the deed came out», he says, Â «coincidentally just when I wasn’t in Italy. And by the way: everything I have to say I’ve written in there. I wrote each page with the utmost intellectual honesty of which I am capable and with all the passion for the profession that I have always had. I would say that my job ends here, it’s up to others to make further decisions. And now I wish they wouldn’t talk about me, because I don’t want anything, I’m not looking for anything. I care about the merit, not the media circus».
The act of which he speaks the deputy attorney general of Milan Tarfusser is the request for revisionhe was born in process on the massacre of Erba. He convinced himself that Olindo Romano and Rosa Bazzi are innocent and wrote 58 pages of “arringa” to be sent to the Brescia Court of Appeal which would have to decide whether to reopen the case or not. He deposited everything in the secretariat and sent a copy to the Attorney General Francesca Nanni and to the Advocate General Lucilla Tontodonati. Who must not have liked his initiative very much and blocked the transmission in Brescia. It is up to them – they decided following the internal “organizational document” – to deal with any request for revision and they will be the ones to evaluate the one written by their colleague. Within a month, they let it be known yesterday.
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Tarfusser, meanwhile, pleads silence and stays at the window to watch. And those who know him don’t rule out the possibility that, if you decide not to forward the document to Brescia, he’ll do it anyway, independently. The deputy prosecutor is not a compliant man and, above all, he has never been too diplomatic in the face of what he considers injustices. Last year, for example: the Csm prevented him from becoming guarantor of the code of ethics for the Municipality of Bolzano (where he began his career as a magistrate) and he called a press conference to explain that “my fault is not being part of the system and I am proud of it”.
Out of the system even in self-criticism, personal and category. A few months ago he went to the premiere of the presentation of the docufilm “Peso morto”, the story of a judicial error that cost the innocent Angelo Massaro 21 years in prison. At the end of the screening, Tarfusser asked to speak, visibly shaken. Â «I apologize on behalf of the institutions», he said to that man and to the audience. “Anguishing” is his adjective when he defines cases of miscarriage of justice. And it was also for the wrong arrest that he himself asked for many years ago Luke Nobleunjustly detained for a few days as a “monster of Merano” and then exonerated.
At the end of his career (68 years and retirement next year), Tarfusser has been deputy attorney general since 2019, when he returned to Italy after 11 years as a judge and as vice president at the International Criminal Court in The Hague (Netherlands). His (among others) the signature for the arrest warrant of the president of Sudan al Bashir for genocide; his arrest warrant for Muammar Gaddafi for crimes against humanity. But it was also his decision to acquit the president of Côte d’Ivoire accused of crimes against humanity for lack of evidence. And again: it was he – as prosecutor in Bolzano – who invented, so to speak, the best practices in the courts of our country. Information technology, reorganization of offices, services, relations with users… and within a few months Bolzano became an example for the rest of Italy. That time seems light years away from his interest in the massacre of Erba, born by chance from a meeting with the lawyers of Olindo and Rosa. “It is unbearable for me the thought that two people, probably victims of miscarriage of justice, are serving a life sentence,” he writes in the request for revision. A premise that does not provide for surrender, even if the transmission of the deed to Brescia were rejected.