With the speed for which it is world-renowned, the Italian justice system is coming to terms with the words spoken by comedian/activist Sabina Guzzanti from the stage of Piazza Navonna during a protest staged on the 8th of July.

It appears that the Procura di Roma will ask the Minister for Justice  Angelino Alfano (who was himself the target of much of the protest that day) to prosecute Guzzanti for ‘villipendio’ or defamation of Pope Benedict XVI, who thanks to the Concordat (signed originally by leading democrat and free speach campaigner Benito Mussolini) is afforded the same legal right as the President of the Republic to not hear nasty things said about himself.

The article in question, #290 of the penal code, allows for a prison sentence of between six months to three years for anyone found guilty of publicly defaming the President, the government,  the constitutional court, the order of judges or the armed forces.

Guzzanti’s alleged defamation rests in this phrase:

“In twenty years Ratzinger will be dead and will be where he should be: in hell, tormented by great big gay devils, actively not passively”.¹

While I’m no legal expert, particularly in the question of Italian libel law,  it seems hard to imagine how this can be considered slander/defamation. Unpleasant, perhaps, but it may well turn out to be true in the end. There’s at least as much probability in it as much of the hokum spouted by Ratzy and his god squad. And if it turns out to be true, where’s the defamation??

This, though, is an abstraction. There are two important issues involved in the possible prosecution of Guzzanti.

The first, and most important is the question as to why the Pope, President, Judges etc should have any particular protection over and above that afforded to a normal citizen in the realm of defamation. For the health of a democracy it should be, in fact, the opposite way around. Once you take a public role the risk of defamation should not become a handy shield to protect you from criticism. At best a public figure’s defence against slander should be in a reply rather than legal action. At worst, they should be entitled to go to the courts under the same processes as the normal citizen.

The second question that the affair brings up, though, is more contemporary. If Guzzanti is put on charges by the Minister for Justice, then the question must be asked as to why other more famous figures have not been charged similarly in the recent past – for example Berlusconi, who remarked about the Italian judiciary to British journalists:

“Those judges are doubly mad! In the first place, because they are politically mad, and in the second place because they are mad anyway.

“If they do that job it is because they are anthropologically different from the rest of the human race.”²
 

1“Fra vent’anni Ratzinger sarà morto e starà dove deve stare: all’Inferno, tormentato da dei diavoloni, frocioni, attivissimi e non passivissimi”

2 In Quotes- Berlusconi in his own words, BBC