Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Il Financial Times da' ragione a Berlusconi.

Italy is right to curb its judges
By Christopher Caldweill 
Published: June 21 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 21 2008 03:00
Enduring Silvio Berlusconi's behaviour last week was like "sitting
through a film you've seen before", said Senator Anna Finocchiaro, the
parliamentary head of Italy's Democratic party. Not two months after
starting his third stint as prime minister, Mr Berlusconi is in a
familiar controversy.
The Senate is finishing work on a package of security laws on which Mr
Berlusconi campaigned. An amendment added by his supporters and passed
on Wednesday would suspend trials for all but the most serious crimes
that took place before mid-2002. This will help focus the state's
limited resources on a wave of violent crime that has alarmed the
public. But that is not all it will do. It will also halt a trial in
Milan that aims to discover whether Mr Berlusconi paid �387,000
($601,000, �306,000) to his lawyer David Mills, the estranged husband
of Tessa Jowell, UK Olympics minister, to give false testimony in a
court case a decade ago. (Both men deny wrongdoing.)
Mr Berlusconi believes he is being singled out by judges on the
"extreme left". This week he requested that the judge presiding over
the Mills trial be removed, on the grounds that her outspoken attacks
on his policies reveal her as too biased to render a fair judgment.
(His request was rejected.) He announced that he would seek a law
providing immunity from prosecution for high-ranking members of the
Italian government. Magistrates have complained that Mr Berlusconi's
moves will cause "irreparable damage to the rule of law".
It is not obvious that they are right. Spain, France, Germany and the
European Union all have some version of immunity. Italy, too, had an
immunity for parliamentarians until it was abolished in 1993, amid a
series of anti-corruption prosecutions. Mr Berlusconi's backers passed
an immunity law in 2003 but the constitutional court voided it the
following year, arguing (reasonably) that it would violate equality
under the law and (absurdly) that it threatened the "right" of
citizens to confront their accusers - as criminal defendants. Such
laws can be abused. Pablo Escobar, the cocaine baron, notoriously
avoided prosecution in the 1980s by getting elected to the Colombian
Chamber of Representatives. But in many cases immunity prevents as
much damage as it permits.
The purpose of immunity is not to give elected officials a free ride.
It is to protect the right of electorates to be ruled by the person
they chose democratically. Do the charges against Mr Berlusconi arise
from a disinterested quest for justice or from a desire on the part of
a certain branch of the Italian elite to overturn a popular choice
they do not like? Such questions can almost never be answered to the
public's satisfaction. In the US in the 1990s, President Bill Clinton
was subjected to one investigation after another. It turned out to be
just as important that the judiciary be above the taint of politics as
that politicians be above the taint of corruption. Immunity might be
the best way to protect the democratic elements of democratic
government - especially in a country where the judiciary is highly
politicised. The US remains such a country.
So does Italy, where, for a decade and a half, judges have enjoyed a
degree of power unique in the west. In the early 1990s, when Italians
came to feel they no longer needed to tolerate the graft that had been
a regular part of cold war politics, ambitious judges toppled the
leadership of the main parties in corruption trials. Italy's post-cold
war purge was more thorough than that of many communist countries.
There was, in effect, a judicial regency over elected officials, with
judges getting to vet the leadership class of the next generation.
Such power is, over the long haul, unhealthy for a democracy. It is
one of the reasons Italians have come to distrust their judiciary. A
poll published on Thursday in La Repubblica, a prestigious Roman daily
that opposes Mr Berlusconi, showed just a third (35 per cent) have
faith in the judicial system, versus 59 per cent who do not. Mr
Berlusconi's voters are overwhelmingly distrustful of judges and his
opponents are mostly satisfied with them. What is striking is that the
centrist voters in Italy's Christian Democratic remnant, the
opposition UDC, favour Mr Berlusconi's plans to suspend trials by 69
per cent to 30 per cent. As La Repubblica put it, Italians "think that
justice is working poorly. And if the price [for fixing it] is some
kind of judiciary 'immunity' for Silvio Berlusconi, they are willing
to pay it."
A Bleak House -style backlog of cases is the weak spot in the Italian
judiciary's legitimacy. Italian law is so dilatory that it butts up
against article six of the European Convention on Human Rights. In
place of fast trials, Italy has the so-called "Pinto law" of 2001, to
compensate people whose court cases drag on. Sir John Major was in
power in Britain the year the Berlusconi-Mills trial began. The
allegations against which Mr Berlusconi was fighting when the last
immunity law was overturned in 2004 dated from 1985. When Mr
Berlusconi's foes warn that 100,000 untried cases would be frozen
because they are more than six years old, they are unwittingly making
the case for the law, not against it.
Mr Berlusconi's judicial stunts are invariably self-serving, but they
are never only self-serving. They always address some genuine problem
severe enough to rally voters behind him. Therein lies his political
genius. Italy is in a panic about crime right now. That panic might be
well founded, or it might not be. But almost everything in his
security law will help allay it. An immunity law, should one be
drafted, might make Italian politics less litigious and more
democratic. The fact that Mr Berlusconi could dodge a trial through
these laws is a reason to oppose them. But it is the only reason to
oppose them, and it is not a sufficient one.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

 they do not like? 
 
quoto, ovviamente.
 
 
 
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