On June 26, the major Italian newspapers announced that Italy has initiated international arbitration to resolve the affair of the two Fusiliers of Marina Latorre and Girone. Various sources have highlighted the government's decision announced by the Farnesina and taken under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
A provision - however invoked for at least two years by the civil society and also by the Parliament - which would have been adopted for the impossibility of reaching an agreed solution of the dispute.
The announcement was accompanied by the news that Italy will immediately request the application of measures that will allow Latorre to stay in Italy and return to Patria di Girone while awaiting the Arbitration judgment. A news certainly awaited after a year of institutional silence justified by the need to leave room for "informal maneuvers entrusted to our intelligence".
Given the results achieved so far and with only one effect, that of having lost time to the detriment of our two soldiers.
These assurances, however, immediately induced some perplexity about the procedures that would have been followed in starting the announced "generic arbitration" and about the competence on the contents of the UNCLOS Convention of the sea, of the English baronet Sir Daniel Betlehem, internationalist expert chosen by the former minister Mogherini.
In fact, if the choice of "Agreed Arbitration" were confirmed, it would return to "Boninian memory" procedures that had led former Deputy Foreign Minister Pistelli to announce a solution to the case shared with Delhi. An option that would hardly guarantee the two marines to remain in Italy, adopted leaving in the drawers of the MAE that of the mandatory arbitration already started in March 2012 and announced by the Government on the 18th of that month (more).
Once again a hesitant and compromising approach that reveals all its shortcomings but presented by the MAE as a panacea that would allow Latorre to continue his convalescence in Italy and Girone to return to his homeland pending the verdict of the International Court. In fact, however, not a universal remedy, because a procedure that would once again offer India to play "the Indians" by holding our military hostage.
In fact, if we re-read the contents of UNCLOS and international law where there is talk of arbitration, only the Mandatory Arbitration, from which India could not escape having ratified the Sea Convention, would guarantee that the Court of Hamburg, within 60 -90 gg, appoint the Court of Judges and assign custody of the two soldiers to a Third State, other than India and Italy.
Instead, we continue to follow the path of an agreed compromise that in three years has led to nothing.The only result achieved to date is that the Indian Supreme Court has ordered the suspension of all judicial proceedings concerning the Fusiliers of Marina Massimiliano Latorre and Salvatore Girone , and the New Delhi special court has today set a new hearing for 25 August (ANSA).
Perhaps it would have been more opportune that Prime Minister Renzi instead of soliciting on the matter the silence of the media and Italians, had asked that of his collaborators, to prevent the endless telenovela basted on the story of the two maro did not become a real farce!
Fernando Termentini
