Grandstand. The investigative chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal must rule on a case-by-case basis, between March 23 and April 20, on the request of the Italian government to extradite ten former militants, men and women, of the Italian extreme left exiled in France for decades. The intention of the French government to respond to this request is a denial of the voice given to these refugees.
This request goes against the moral and political commitments previously made with regard to the hundreds of Italian activists who came to take refuge in our country after the 1970s. It breaks with an exceptional asylum policy practiced for forty years by all the French governments, and of which the President of the Republic François Mitterrand was the guarantor by this speech of April 1985 to the League of Human Rights: The Italian refugees (…) broke with the infernal machine in which they had engaged (…). I told the Italian government that they were immune from punishment by way of extradition. » We now know that the Italian government at the time only saw the advantages.
Perfectly integrated into French society, through their work, their families, their children, their grandchildren, having turned the page on violent practices since the last century, these men and women, it must be said, are the object of ‘a persecution that is much more revenge than justice. To present them as dangerous individuals, to treat them as common criminals carrying a current dangerousness, is perfectly absurd and totally anachronistic.
A death sentence announced
The very symbol of this state injustice is the treatment inflicted on Luigi B., for whom the qualification of “habitual delinquent” is fabricated from scratch in order to try to cancel a prescription already acquired. It would be a question of a work of justice, of healing the still open wounds of the 1970s and thus closing this violent piece of history. But how can we think that the judicial system, by targeting a few individuals among the surviving actors of multilateral violence, in which an entire society had sunk, including the state apparatus, can heal the damage of history, the wounds unique people?
How can we think that the imprisonment of ten people taken as examples can replace the critical reflection still underway today among historians and citizens who are trying, many years later, to situate the issues and responsibilities of a tragic past? And then, what meaning would a sentence to serve after a successful and irrefutable reintegration of the beings one wants to punish?
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