By Danilo Breschi · Sunday, February 18, 2007 Last February 3, a policeman, Filippo Raciti, 38 years old, was killed by a “fan” during an urban battle outside the stadium of Catania after the soccer match Catania-Palermo. As of this writing, the murderer has not been identified. He could well be a teenager. He could have used a steel bolt or perhaps a basin ripped out of a stadium bathroom to pummel the policeman’s liver. The investigations continue. The policeman was married and the father of two young sons.
In Italy the violence of soccer fans is not a new phenomenon. It could be largely solved through legitimate repression, an appropriate application of legal violence by the state to establish a respect for law in order to prevent its violation. Yet there has not been adequate legislation to address the problem, and the best current laws have never been enforced. The primary issue has never been money—even though soccer is big business in Italy.
The key problem is that there is no civic culture to sustain law and order (a formula which most of the Italian intelligentsia reject as “fascist”). A pseudo-sociological culture has similarly rejected the term “repression,” replacing it with “pre-emption,” even though very little has been pre-empted during the past thirty years. The result? Every year there is plenty of fighting around soccer games, and sometimes someone dies, but nothing changes.
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By Danilo Breschi · Saturday, January 6, 2007 The radical lawyer John Cooke prosecuted the King of England, Charles I, in 1649—and in doing so opened a chapter in legal history that reverberates 357 years later. Lawyer and human rights campaigner Geoffrey Robertson, in an extract from his book The Tyrannicide Brief (2005), describes Cooke’s pivotal role and assesses its modern implications:
Cooke’s charge began with a fundamental proposition: the King of England was not a person, but an office whose every occupant was entrusted with a limited power to govern ‘by and according to the laws of the land and not otherwise’. It had been with the criminal object of securing unlimited and tyrannical power that Charles I had levied war against Parliament and had set out to destroy the very people whose life and liberty he was obliged to preserve. To bring home his guilt for the crippling loss of English life on both sides in the war he had started in 1642, Cooke invoked the doctrine which is called, in modern war-crimes courts, ‘command responsibility’:
‘By which it appears that he, the said Charles Stuart, has been and is the occasioner, author and continuer of the said unnatural, cruel and bloody wars and therefore guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs to the nation acted and committed in the said wars or occasioned thereby.’
The charges against Milosevic at The Hague convey the same idea—the responsibility of the commander for all the natural and probable consequences of his commands. Cooke alleged not only high treason, but ‘other High Crimes’, which he spelled out in the final paragraph: Charles Stuart he impeached as ‘a tyrant, traitor, murderer and public and implacable enemy to the Commonwealth of England’. In a nutshell, what the Solicitor-General had created was a new offence, one that could condemn most of the crowned heads of Europe at the time, and many of the dictators and undemocratic rulers who would come to power in the nations of the world in the following centuries. He had made tyranny a crime.
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