Italy and France’s Dispute Over 1970s Ex-Militants Takes Another Turn
Federica Rossi, WPR, Aug 10, 2023 https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/years-of-lead-italy-france-relations-extradition-asylum-mitterrand/
In March, the latest chapter was written in a political and legal controversy between Italy and France that dates back to the final decade of the Cold War. France’s highest criminal court, the Cour de Cassation, definitively rejected the Italian government’s request to extradite 10 former Italian militants for their actions in the 1970s and early 1980s, during a period of widespread political unrest and violence in Italy commonly known as the “years of lead.” The verdict caps a four-decade-long saga of political decisions and U-turns, court judgements and social mobilizations. But it fails to resolve the tensions at the heart of those events.
The 1970s in Italy were characterized by strong and durable social movements, including a proliferation of far-left organizations, as well as the presence of militant neofascist groups. The period was marked by the increasing use of violence by far-left organizations, ranging from sabotage and damage to property, to kidnapping, kneecapping and targeted assassinations, all as a means of bringing about political change. But violence was also used by far-right militants, including bombings in public places such as the Piazza Fontana in Milan in 1969, the Piazza della Loggia in Brescia in 1974, the Italicus train in 1974 and the Bologna railway station in 1980. These bombings, which claimed dozens of victims, were allegedly facilitated by state agents.
The Italian state responded to the unrest and political violence with the rapid adoption of emergency legislation and exceptional measures, particularly between 1978 and 1982. These included the creation of special police units, the establishment of maximum-security prisons and the controversial use of witnesses known as pentiti, or “repentants,” referring to militants who, after their arrest, collaborated in investigations and trials in exchange for reduced sentences. The early 1980s were also marked by mass arrests of mainly left-wing political activists and sympathizers, with over 4,000 activists imprisoned on charges and sentences ranging from “armed insurrection against the state” and violence against property or persons to moral complicity in violent crimes, among others. The use of torture against left-wing militants in police custody by special police units has also recently been acknowledged, following the public confessions of two police officers in 2012.
In this context, some 200 Italian militants fled to France, where then-President Francois Mitterrand, a socialist, had been elected in 1981 on a platform in which support for human rights and the idea of France as a terre d’asile, or land of asylum, featured prominently. Although these Italian militants were never granted formal “asylum,” successive French governments consistently refused the extradition requests of their Italian counterparts, making this issue a recurrent source of tension between the two countries.
France subsequently changed its position on extradition of Italian militants in the early 2000s. But before looking at that change in approach, it is important to understand what underpinned France’s position in the 1980s, which is now commonly referred to as the “Mitterrand Doctrine.” On several occasions in 1985, and more formally at the 65th Congress of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, or League of Human Rights, that same year, Mitterrand acknowledged the presence of Italian militants convicted of politically motivated offenses, while declaring his intention to refuse extradition requests and allow them to live peacefully in France, provided they renounced political violence.
This was part of Mitterrand’s broader effort to make France a “land of asylum” for political refugees from around the world. But it was also in line with Mitterrand’s previous positions and statements criticizing Italy’s emergency laws and management of the political violence in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, the trials of political activists in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s were strongly criticized in France at the time.
Mitterrand’s informal policy of asylum for Italian militants was far from a consensus position among French politicians, and his “doctrine” has been the subject of controversy and competing interpretations over the years. In fact, in 1994, while Mitterrand was still president but no longer enjoyed a parliamentary majority, the right-wing government of then-Prime Minister Edouard Balladur had signed an extradition decree for Paolo Persichetti. A former Red Brigades militant, Persichetti had been sentenced in 1991 to 22 years in prison for “participation in an armed gang” and “moral complicity in a murder.” However, the actual extradition was not carried out, even when Mitterrand’s right-wing successor, Jacques Chirac, was elected in 1995.In Italy, ex-militants were labeled as “terrorists” on the run. By contrast, in France, they were seen as people who had given up political violence decades ago and settled down to new lives in a new country.
In 2002, however, soon after Chirac’s re-election, the French government made a sudden U-turn on the issue, arresting Persichetti and immediately deporting him to Italy based on the 1994 extradition order. To further mark the end of France’s longstanding policy toward Italian political exiles of that generation, two other extradition proceedings were opened shortly thereafter: that of Cesare Battisti in 2004 and Marina Petrella in 2007.
To understand why France’s position on the issue changed, it helps to look at the influence of global and European dynamics at the time, as well as the broader context of the political changes taking place in both France and Italy. The French government’s about-face took place in the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, when counterterrorism and security had become priority issues in international relations, justifying the introduction, acceleration and intensification of surveillance, policing and preventive justice measures. At the European Union level, judicial integration and police cooperation since the late 1990s had culminated in the decision to establish a European Arrest Warrant in 2002.
More significantly, in 2001, Italy had elected a right-wing government whose campaign was characterized by an emphasis on “law and order” and punitive rhetoric. After Chirac was reelected touting a similar tough-on-crime position the following year, the extradition of Persichetti and the beginning of extradition proceedings against Battisti and Petrella offered a convenient way for Paris and Rome to demonstrate their willingness to cooperate on security issues.
Finally, Italy had seen a resurgence of political violence with the assassination of two labor lawyers who had served as government advisers, Massimo D’Antona in 1999 and Marco Biagi in 2002. The fact that the killings were carried out by a far-left group commonly referred to as the New Red Brigades helped legitimize in the eyes of the public the demands for the extradition of former militants living in France.
Battisti’s case was particularly noteworthy, because it brought to light political and judicial tensions between the two countries that had until then remained implicit, but which were in fact paradigmatic of the issues raised collectively by Italian political exiles in France. In the 1970s, Battisti had been a member of the far-left group Proletari Armati per il Communismo, or Armed Proletarians for Communism. In 1991 and 1993, he was definitively sentenced in Italy to life imprisonment for his involvement in four murders, after a trial in absentia and with evidence largely based on the testimony of a pentito. He fled to France in 1981 and then to Mexico, before finally returning to settle in France in 1990. Having severed all ties with Italy, he lived for the next 15 years in France, where he raised a family and became a well-known crime novelist.
His arrest in 2004 and the start of his extradition proceedings, just a year and a half after Persichetti’s extradition, triggered strong opposition from French intellectuals and fellow crime novelists, which was supported by lawyers, a judges’ trade union and human rights organizations, with broad societal backing as well. The extent of support for Battisti, as well as the duration of the mobilization against his extradition, brought into clear focus the main points of discord surrounding the issue of Italian ex-militants in France. Moreover, although often presented as a dispute between France and Italy, the tensions were more complex than just national positions, with constituencies and arguments for and against their extradition in both countries.
The arguments put forward, both for and against, could be divided into three main areas of debate and controversy. The first was the criticism by lawyers, politicians and human rights groups of the emergency and anti-terrorism legislation adopted in Italy during the period of political violence, and the legal procedures used to convict militants at the time. Critics highlighted their detrimental impact on individual freedoms, the rights of association and _expression_, the rights of the defendant to a fair trial, and constitutional guarantees. The extensive use of trials in absentia as well as of pentiti to provide evidence in investigations and trials, first introduced in 1979, were other key points of criticism. Finally, the aggravation of charges and extremely harsh sentences handed down due to the political motivations behind the offenses or the defendants’ political association was also perceived as a violation of democratic rights.
Second, Mitterrand, like other left-wing politicians in both Italy and France in the 1980s, had expressed support for an amnesty for politically motivated crimes to provide closure for the period of violence. And over the years, proposals for a political amnesty for the “years of lead” were put forward on both sides of the Alps. Although this possibility has now become increasingly remote, it was, and continues to be, a key demand of the French mobilizations against the extradition of Battisti and other Italian exiles.
These arguments and criticisms echoed those heard in France at the time of the trials in Italy in the 1980s, and they were among the main reasons for Mitterrand’s decision to allow Italian militants to stay in France in the first place. The third set of arguments in the controversy, however, reflected the “biographical break” in the lives of all the former militants since that period. In Italy, they were labeled as “terrorists” on the run, convicted for a series of offenses and crimes related to political violence. By contrast, in France, they were seen as people who had given up political violence decades ago and settled down to new lives in a new country, where they had built families and social ties.
Italy’s judicial approach to the “years of lead” has helped create the conditions for debates and controversies to resurface regularly, as exemplified by the issue of Italian militants in France.
The same arguments characterized the debates in the case of Petrella, another former Red Brigade militant who was arrested in 2007 and subjected to extradition proceedings. Petrella’s extradition was finally suspended in 2008 by Chirac’s successor, then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, for “humanitarian reasons,” due to her serious health condition. But the many twists and turns of Battisti’s case continued even after his extradition had been decided.
Battisti ultimately fled France in August 2004, before the decree ordering his return to Italy had been officially signed by then-Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. He was subsequently arrested in Brazil in 2007, where he spent four years in prison before being released and granted political refugee status under then-President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva in 2011. However, his status in Brazil proved to be unstable, characterized by official U-turns driven by the vagaries of the country’s domestic politics and successive judicial reviews of his case. In December 2018, under the right-wing government of then-President Michel Temer, Battisti’s extradition decree was formally signed. He fled to Bolivia, but was arrested and deported to Italy in January 2019.
His arrest upon his arrival in Rome, at the age of 64 and after 37 years away from the country, was a perfect example of “penal populism” and the political instrumentalization of a legal case. In a staged event, armed police led by Matteo Salvini, the far-right interior minister at the time, waited for him at the airport like a hunting trophy, with the scene broadcast on television and social media. Battisti was sent to a maximum-security prison, where he was subjected to six months of daily solitary confinement, before being transferred to a normal category prison, where he is now serving a life sentence.
Battisti’s case was not only paradigmatic of the issues raised by Italian political exiles in France, but also significant in revealing the complex and shifting tensions between the judicial and the political more generally. The logic of the criminal justice process—which seeks punishment rather than accountability, to close and archive rather than to open and discuss—singles out and criminalizes individuals, rather than providing a framework for understanding broader collective, institutional and structural responsibilities, and the historical dynamics of widespread and multifaceted violence.
From this perspective, the judicial and repressive approach to the armed struggle in Italy in the 1970s has contributed to creating the conditions for debates and controversies to resurface regularly, as exemplified by the issue of Italian militants in France. It has prolonged these judicial processes into the present, closed off the possibility of historicizing the debates and experiences involved, and laid the groundwork for disingenuous political uses of past violence and victims.
In April 2021, two years after Battisti’s extradition to Italy, 10 other former militants between the ages of 62 and 79 were suddenly arrested in their homes in France and placed under judicial supervision, following a new extradition request by the Italian government in 2020. A year later, in June 2022, the Paris Court of Appeal ruled against their extradition on human rights grounds. In its decision, the court recognized the length of time these former militants had lived in France—more than 20 years for all of them, and more than 30 for some; the fact that they had raised families and built social ties, professional lives and careers in France; and the fact that they had all long since severed any links with Italy.
The court therefore held that, despite the seriousness of the offenses for which they had been convicted in Italy, their arrest represented an illegitimate interference with their human right to respect for private and family life, as protected by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that their extradition would constitute a disproportionate infringement of that right in the absence of an actual necessity to maintain public order and prevent crime. The decision of the Court of Cassation in March 2023, to which the public prosecutor had appealed for a review of the lower court’s verdict, represented a definitive ruling on the case.
Historically, amnesties and pardons have been used to close periods of political unrest and conflict, and pacify societies in their aftermath. They represented the prerogative of political power to intervene by suspending or modifying judicial decisions, justified by the idea that a court decision may be legally and formally just, but morally and socially unjust. In this case, however, it was two French courts that restored the primacy of social and humanitarian reason over punitive rhetoric and penal populism, at a time when political powers around the world have increasingly instrumentalized the criminal justice process to promote a punitive agenda that serves their political ends. Their decision invites us all to think critically about the purposes of punishment and the discourses that prioritize it “at all costs.”
Does this make a political amnesty from Italy’s “years of lead” less relevant today? To the contrary, the significance of a political amnesty is more relevant than ever. It would not only free those who have now been serving their sentences for 20 and even 30 years, or others who face the risk of new trials, but also pave the way for a broader and collective discussion about that period and the responsibilities of those in power at the time. It would also turn the page on the political instrumentalization of the 1970s and allow the polyphony of experiences to be expressed and heard.
In short, a political amnesty remains relevant in order to seek understanding and accountability rather than punishment, and to move away from a politics of the present that needs the spectacular criminalization of the past to legitimize itself.