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Just how credible is the European Court of Justice? Thirteen
judges of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg have rejected an urgent request by the European
Commission to impose high fines on Italy for discriminating against foreign-language
lecturers, or lettori, who teach
at Italian universities. As a direct result of this unexpected and controversial ruling
the lecturers may now be forced to abandon their 20-year battle for equal
rights together with all hope of ever obtaining
justice. Mr. Vassilios Skouris Mr Peter Jann Mr Christiaan Timmermans Mr Allan Rosas Mr Jiri Malenovsky Mr Jean-Pierre Puissochet Mr Romain Schintgen Ms Ninon Colneric Mr Stig von Bahr Mr José Rodrigues Mr Jan Klucka Mr Uno Lohmus Mr Egils Levits RE: Case C-119/04 and your 18 July 2006 ruling against the request for urgent action sought by the European Commission under EC Article 228 for Italy's failure to fulfil its obligations towards foreign-language lecturers suffering longrunning job discrimination at Italian universities, we respectfully invite you to consider resigning your positions as judges and to seek more suitable employment elsewhere. JUST Response is an international human rights journal concerned with the worldwide monitoring and promotion of the basic principles of truth, justice, freedom and democracy. On 13 March 2004 JUST Response published an open letter, Italian lessons in law breaking, to Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and Silvio Berlusconi outlining the problem of job discrimination and inviting urgent action. Mr Ciampi and Mr Berlusconi were then president and premier of Italy. Predictably, neither responded. In that letter we expressed our full support for some 1,500 foreign-language lettori who have been suffering job discrimination at 77 Italian universities for up to 24 years. Such discrimination has taken its toll on the lettori not only economically and professionally but also physically and psychologically, inevitably also on their families. We urged Mr Ciampi and Mr Berlusconi to apply both the spirit and the letter of the law but this turned out to be tantamount to asking them to make water flow upwards. Now a chamber of 13 judges at the European Court of Justice has reached the openly absurd conclusion that there is insufficient evidence of ongoing Italian misconduct for fines to be imposed on Italy, this presumably on the basis of unexamined false declarations by the Italian state. Domenico Pacitti, the editor of JUST Response human rights journal, said: "It is not clear to me whether this was an exceptionally poor ruling by judges who normally perform better but who found themselves on this occasion ill-equipped to deal with a moral and legal black hole such as Italy, or whether it was just the latest in a line of fudged decisions. Either way it certainly casts a cloud over the credibility of the European Court of Justice. I think that before these people are allowed to inflict further damage on the citizens of Europe they should seriously consider standing down and leaving the job to others whose judgements are more compatible with sound common sense." Pacitti added: "For over 20 years the lettori have conducted their case impeccably, following all the correct legal channels and placing their trust – erroneously and ingenuously as it turns out – in the ECJ. It is to the lettori's credit as honest European citizens that they ignored serious advice given to them in Italy by those ministerial bureaucrats who told them that having the right connections in the Mafia or the Vatican provided the key to solving their problems." The
Editor and Staff of JUST Response NOTE: JUST Response published this open letter on 3 February 2007.
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