The Council of Europe (CoE)
on Monday urged Italy to swiftly introduce the crimes of torture
and degrading treatment, ensuring they are properly sanctioned
and culprits can no longer get off.
Voicing "concern", the CoE's council of ministers said
measures taken by Italy to comply with an April 2015 European
Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling on the infamous police night
raid on sleeping quarters of demonstrators at the 2001 Group of
Eight summit were "insufficient".
Politicians and activists urged the government to act.
"It's scandalous that Italy should obstruct all international
bodies and it's scandalous that our country does not envisage
that torture, a crime against humanity, is a crime," said
Patrizio Gonnella, chair of the prisoners' rights group
Antigone.
On April 7, 2015 the ECHR condemned Italy and called for
legislative changes after "torture" during a police raid in July
2001 on anti-globalization protestors camping out at the Diaz
school during the Genoa G8 summit.
The court condemned Italy not only for what happened to the
demonstrators, but also because it said the country lacks
appropriate legislation to punish the crime of torture even
though it ratified a UN convention on torture in 1988.
The government said in response that an anti-torture bill
mandating sentences of up to 12 years now before the Lower House
would be sped up.
The Diaz raid is perhaps Italy's most notorious case of
police brutality. In the night assault on the Diaz school,
hundreds of police attacked about 100 activists and a few
journalists, wounding 82 and seriously injuring 61 - three
critically and one, British journalist Mark Covell, left in a
coma with rib and spinal injuries.
Officers planted evidence including two Molotov cocktails
and hammers and knives from a nearby construction site to
justify the raid.
Amnesty International called the event "the most serious
suspension of democratic rights in a Western country since the
Second World War".
In its ruling in April 2015, the ECHR upheld a complaint from
a 62-year-old Italian, Arnaldo Cestaro, who was brutally beaten
that night and still suffers from the injuries he sustained.
It noted that none of the officers who actually inflicted
the beatings are serving jail time because of the statute of
limitations, and urged Italy to rectify this.
In reaction after that sentence, ruling Democratic Party (PD)
chair Matteo Orfini said it is "shameful" that Gianni De
Gennaro was now president of State-controlled defence giant
Finmeccanica, recently renamed Leonardo, because he was national
police chief during the scandal-hit Genoa G8 summit.
De Gennaro, appointed head of Finmeccanica in July 2013,
ordered the raid on demonstrators but was not punished by the
courts.
He was the only ranking officer to escape nominal punishment.
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