In un commento per The Guardian uscito lunedi 31 maggio 2010, una giovane ricercatrice italiana presso l'Università londinese di Westminster, Benedetta Brevini, si esprime sul tema della libertà di informazione e della tutela del pluralismo delle opinioni a salvaguardia della democrazia |
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EUROPE SHOULD PROTECT ITALY'S FREEDOM OF SPEECH
The EU has dismissed Berlusconi's moves to gag the press as a national issue, but it must act in the name of shared democracy
"Unpopular ideas can be silenced and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban," wrote George Orwell in his preface to Animal Farm in 1943. And I thought the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, had a tight enough grip on public opinion without the need for any "official ban".
Berlusconi controls roughly 80% of Italian free-to-air television channels, in a country where just 20% of the population reads newspapers. Did he really need to impose any further constraint on freedom of speech? A draft law that is going to be approved by the parliament in the following weeks will gag the last few, daring news outlets that exert oversight on the government.
Apparently, Berlusconi's control on Italian television was not enough to stop some newspapers from publishing embarrassing stories regarding the prime minister and his close allies. In March this year, newspapers published phone taps ordered by prosecutors in the town of Trani, where Berlusconi was putting pressure on members of Agcom (the Italian Ofcom) to silence some adverse political talkshows on Italian public television channels. Or again – with even more detrimental consequences for the government – last April, when the press dared to publish phone intercepts of a probe into public work contracts that forced the industry minister, Claudio Scajola, to resign.
And so came the urgent need to pass this unconstitutional law that will both silence the press and hamper the chances for magistrates to pursue criminal investigations. In fact, this law would restrict wiretaps for investigation purposes and whack jail sentences on the journalists publishing interceptions. Indeed, wiretaps are fundamental tools for investigators to find evidence for serious crimes. Without wiretaps, many high-profile bosses from the mafia, such as Salvatore Riina or Bernardo Provenzano, would not have been arrested.
Yet, there is much more. Not only would the media be prohibited from publishing transcripts regarding investigations, but also from publishing summaries until the defendant is sent to trial. Translated into Italian standards this could mean a four- to five-year wait. Furthermore, publishers face up to a €465,000 fine and reporters risk up to one month in prison if they publish interceptions. With just one law, the Italian government will curtail freedom of information and prosecutors' duties to investigate.
What has the EU done so far to secure media pluralism and protect Italian democracy? In 2004, both the Council of Europe and the European parliament explicitly denounced the open conflict of interest between Berlusconi's media interests and his political role as prime minister. Last year Freedom House – an independent watchdog organisation based in Washington DC – downgraded Italy from "free" to "partially free" country, the only case in Europe to be ranked so low.
Yet Europe has never really acted to amend this situation. Even on 21 October 2009 theEuropean parliament rejected a resolution denouncing the lack of media freedom in Italy and dismissed it as a national matter. Is democracy just a national issue for Europe? Or shouldn't all European states share at least a core set of democratic values?
The new Lisbon treaty came into effect on 1 December 2009. Under the treaty, the EU charter of fundamental rights is legally binding. Article 11 of the charter states clearly that "everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers". This means that all European laws should embody these principles.
We need a free and balanced media to secure a functional democracy. Europe should stop considering democracy a strictly national issue and should act to protect Italy's freedom of speech. "If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all," Orwell once wrote, "it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth." Intellectual liberty is at stake in Italy now and Europe cannot ignore this if it wants to show that it cares about democracy and not only about economic prosperity.
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