Andreotti, Blair and the European Arrest Warrant

A letter from Torquil Dick-Erikson, Rome 

Dear Editor,

Tony Blair's good friend, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, says that the system of Italian criminal justice has "gone berserk" as it sentences the country's longest-standing politician - continuously in government for nearly fifty years since 1946 and seven times Premier - to 24 years in prison for ordering the killing of an "inconvenient" journalist, by Mafia hitmen.

So why is Tony Blair's government asking Parliament to accept the European Arrest Warrant, which will subject British citizens in Britain directly to 14 foreign criminal jurisdictions, including the Italian "berserkers", removing all protection and right of scrutiny by British courts? How can we have "mutual confidence", which Jack Straw said in Tampere has to be the basis for "mutual recognition of each other's judicial decisions", in a system like that?

Alternatively, the Italian Appeals court was quite right to convict Signor Andreotti, because he is guilty as charged. In which case we cannot escape the conclusion that ever since World War II, Italy has let itself be governed by Mafia placemen. More theateningly for the UK, Italy was a founder member of the EU, and is the homeland of Commission President Romano Prodi, a longtime Christian Democrat just like Giulio Andreotti who is now "revealed" as a Mafioso with blood on his hands, and whose signature is on the Treaty of Maastricht.

Yet Tony Blair is also telling us that his government will ask Parliament to ratify a "constitution" for a politically "United Europe" which will bind Britain in with all of the nations of the EU, including Italy, tightly together in a single political entity. And Blair's government is going to steamroller us into this, not allowing the people of Britain to say what they think directly in a referendum on this new constitution.

But is this not rash? Suppose a "United Europe" decides to give itself a President, and an Italian politician rises to take that post, and later is discovered to be a Mafioso who resorts to murdering journalists as a
public relations policy option? (Let's hope Alistair Campbell's not going to get any ideas!) Would that do for the people of Britain, to be governed by a Mafioso?

At least one of these explanations has to be right. Either way, how can Britain continue to pursue an EU project of "ever-closer" political and legal union together with a country that is either "governed by Mafiosi" or "whose judiciary has gone mad"?

Note: This letter was published by JUST Response on November 20 2002.

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