In his novel three horsespublished in 2001 in France (Gallimard), the Italian writer Erri De Luca imagines a character who flees the military dictatorship of Argentina. “I don’t even know if I’m still wanted on behalf of those years. There are no more toy soldiers in the government, but the laws are weird and we probably forget that they are in force, like that, by distraction”, said the fugitive, never quiet. This fiction seems to take shape in the courtroom of the Lyon Court of Appeal, Friday, February 24. Vincenzo Vecchi, 49, rolls his worried gaze over the paneling of the investigating chamber, where his judicial fate is decided, staring at the small luminous panel which indicates the emergency exit, at the top, to the left of the magistrates. Established in Brittany for ten years, the man with a receding hairline, round glasses and small gray mustaches, is under the scope of a European arrest warrant, for facts which date back more than twenty years.
The Italian government is seeking to recover its national, sentenced to twelve and a half years in prison for his participation in the anti-G8 demonstration in 2001 in Genoa. The case raises the concern of many lawyers and intellectuals, friends and relatives gathered in a support committee, present on the steps of the palace of 24 columns. Because the European arrest warrant issued by Italy conveys the principle of the so-called “devastation and pillage” law, written in 1930 by the fascist regime of Mussolini, which consists in repressing the mere presence at a demonstration, without necessarily proving acts of violence or degradation.
In 2001 in Genoa, the demonstrations against the G8 were marked by the actions of violent small groups, and brutal police repression accompanied by acts of torture, condemned by the European Court of Human Rights. A young demonstrator is killed, hundreds are injured. The following year, the Italian authorities decided to prosecute ten demonstrators, nicknamed “The Ten of Genoa”. Among them, Vincenzo Vecchi is accused of “violence, theft and damage by fire”, on the basis of photographs.
The images show him with a construction board, not far from a barricade, then drinking a can near a looted supermarket, or near burned tires. The whole is brought together under the incrimination of “devastation and plunder”. After a year in pre-trial detention in 2002, Vincenzo Vecchi fled, without waiting for the final sentence, pronounced in 2012 by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation: twelve and a half years in prison.
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