Security Experts: „Italy on the Authoritarian, Illiberal and Undemocratic Way“
257 jurists sound the alarm. The appeal: “At risk our form of state, you want to govern with fear.” Constitutionalist Roberto Zaccaria adds, “Meloni said that April 25th reaffirms the democratic values that the fascist regime had denied. But with this new decree she compresses precisely the fundamental freedoms.“
In normal times, jurists dedicated to public law, which regulates the organization and functioning of the state, interpret and teach the Constitution and also take individual positions on the normative life of our community. “But there are times, however, when institutional forcings of particular gravity occur, in the face of which it is no longer possible to remain silent and indeed it is our duty to take public positions together”, warns the Appeal for Democratic Security signed by 257 public lawyers from all Italian universities, including presidents and vice-presidents emeriti of the Constitutional Court: Ugo de Siervo, Gaetano Silvestri, Gustavo Zagrebelsky, Enzo Cheli, and Paolo Maddalena.
The Appeal joins those of the Magistrates' Association, the Criminal Chambers, and professors of criminal law to draw public attention to the security decree approved April 11th by Giorgia Meloni's government. An intervention that, the promoters write, “in method and merit makes explicit an overall design, which betrays an authoritarian, illiberal and anti-democratic approach, not episodic or occasional but aimed at becoming a system, at governing with fear instead of governing fear“.
“It is rare for such a large number of university professors to take a public stand against a single piece of legislation”, explains Roberto Zaccaria, a professor of Constitutional Law formerly at the University of Florence and one of the promoters of the Appeal. “An act of civic engagement”, he calls it. In the face of an intervention “that can undermine fundamental freedoms and be even more dangerous than a constitutional reform”.
So much so, he admits, that “I do not recall in recent times public safety interventions of this intensity and force”. The underlying problem, Zaccaria explains, is the risk of turning the issue of security “into a founding ideal value, into an unacceptable general limitation because constitutional freedoms cannot go against general limits. Like public order, which has no citizenship in the Constitution”.
Even worse if the plan is carried out by tearing up a bill already in the home stretch. “A real snatching from Parliament and a blatant circumvention of the Constitution”, Zaccaria attacks. And he quotes Meloni: “She said that on April 25th we reaffirm the centrality of those democratic values that the fascist regime had denied. But if you pass in this way a security decree with which a citizen risks years in prison for only a sit-in, aren't you compressing fundamental freedoms?”
On the merits, “this is an extremely dangerous design to repress those forms of dissent that it is fundamental to recognize in a democratic society”. In particular, the Appeal denounces the equating of centers for foreigners with prisons and passive resistance to violent acts. The so-called “urban daspo,” decided by the quaestor, which restricts personal freedom by treating those who are convicted and those who are merely denounced equally. Concerns that police can carry noncommissioned weapons even off duty, and the tightening of penalties for offenses occurring “on the occasion” of a public demonstration. Such a vague provision that “conflicts with the principle of typicality of criminally relevant conduct, moreover violating the specific constitutional protection accorded to the freedom of assembly in a public place or place open to the public”.
Equally vague, finally, would be the provisions that provide for punishments of up to seven years for occupying places that are completely unspecified in scope and left to the interpreter's entirely subjective evaluations and preferences. Choices that call into question our form of state because, Zacharia concludes, “the eternal balance between the individual and authority is resolved only in favor of the latter, with a „securitarian obsession“ that does not belong to the vision of democratic states, but dangerously traces the logic of police states”.
(Reporting of Il Fatto Quotidiano)