Italy’s gaffe-prone prime minister: Arresting

Date: 01/11/03

Delays over Europe's arrest warrant

MARTIN SCHULZ, a German socialist Euro-MP, has a talent for luring Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, into saying things he shouldn't. In July, he needled him into likening Mr Schulz to a concentration-camp guard. When Mr Berlusconi recently returned to Strasbourg, Mr Schulz asked what the Italian government was doing to ratify plans for a common European arrest warrant. Mr Berlusconi's response in the chamber was vague. But at a press conference afterwards, he announced that “next week the Italian parliament will discuss, and vote on, the bill [to approve a] European arrest warrant and prosecutor's office.”

Just one problem: Mr Berlusconi's announcement was nonsense. No debate is scheduled, and none has taken place. The only bill on the matter has been proposed by the opposition, not the government. The chairman of the justice commission of the lower house, Gaetano Pecorella, a member of Mr Berlusconi's party, has referred the bill to the constitutional-affairs commission, on the grounds that the idea runs counter to Italy's highest law.

Italy is pledged by none other than Mr Berlusconi himself to ratify the European arrest warrant by the end of the year. Yet even before the opposition bill was diverted, there was scant chance of meeting that deadline. Inevitably, there are suspicions that Mr Berlusconi's followers are obstructing ratification because of the problems it could cause the prime minister, whose legal travails are by no means confined to Italy. He has, for instance, been under investigation in Spain for alleged fraud over the acquisition of a stake in the television channel Telecinco.

Many of Mr Berlusconi's allies dislike a proposal that, in the words of Italy's justice minister, Roberto Castelli, would mean “the cession of a significant tranche of national sovereignty”. Indeed, the coalition government is showing a streak of Euroscepticism over the issue. Mr Castelli belongs to the Northern League, whose leader, Umberto Bossi, had this to say: “By abolishing the limits of territorial jurisdiction and the checks [imposed by] extradition, you replace the criminal-law codes of the individual states and invent a single community legal code that will do away with the residual autonomy of the states. It is a Nazi folly.”