Open Letter To Italian PM

Why we are sending an open letter to the Italian prime minister


TO HIS many other talents, Silvio Berlusconi has recently added that of ironist. The Italian prime minister entered the role of president of the European Union's Council of Ministers with a bang, by likening a German member of the European Parliament to a Nazi-era concentration camp guard. Many failed to see the joke. And the resulting imbroglio with the German government had a paradoxical effect: it distracted attention from the very accusation that the German MEP had been noisily making, namely that Mr Berlusconi has exploited his parliamentary majority in Italy to put himself beyond the reach of the law.

For that is indeed what he has done. Dogged by a series of judicial investigations and court cases when he entered office in 2001, Mr Berlusconi has managed to defeat the prosecutors and the courts. He secured the downgrading of the charge of false accounting for private companies, with retrospective effect, thus making accusations against him barred under the statute of limitations. He tried to change the rules on the admissibility of documents obtained from across the border in Switzerland, and tried to get the jurisdiction of his big remaining criminal trial moved. Finally, having failed with those measures he managed to bring in a law making Italy's prime minister, along with the country's other top officials, immune from prosecution during their time in office. As a democratically elected leader, with grave and onerous responsibilities to the people, Mr Berlusconi argued that he should not be made subject to the indignity of a trial. His justice minister, Roberto Castelli, went even further, causing a furore within the governing coalition last week by trying to block a judicial investigation into alleged tax fraud at Mr Berlusconi's biggest media company. (This week he was forced to relent.) It is beyond the prime minister's dignity even to be investigated.



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