Tomorrow the Indian Supreme Court should issue the decisive verdict on how it will proceed on the judicial level against the two of our Navy Fusiliers ceded from Italy to India for undue criminal action and against all dictates of international and treaty law.
A story with very dark connotations that originates from two fundamental acts. India's absolute inattention to international law and the Convention of the Sea (UNCLOS) as regards the location of where the events should have occurred, 20,4 miles from the coast, absolutely in international waters. The total Italian neglect for not having demanded the application of the right of functional immunity recognized by the treaty law to all the military in the world, if involved in serious events on the occasion of the fulfillment of the task assigned to them by the home State. Moreover, a prerogative recognized by India to its soldiers also in the case of voluntary crimes as happened recently in Congo where two soldiers framed in the UN peacekeeping contingent raped a woman.
A key date is 10 February, after 24 months of three-card game run by an India that is inattentive to the rules, little respectful of Italy, but very sensitive to the internal pressures exerted by powerful castes, some perhaps also close to local criminal organizations complicit of maritime piracy.
What the Indian Supreme Court will decide is not easy to predict, any hypothesis can be disavowed given the flexibility of interpreting and applying the laws in force in the country, as has happened up to now.An example among all, the decision of 18 January 2013 Court which, while admitting that the facts had taken place in international waters, decided to establish a Special Court with a single judge to whom to entrust the case by entrusting the NIA to carry out the investigations.
We have arrived today passing through a series of indictments that are not always motivated, but accompanied by words of extreme optimism from many Italian institutional representatives. For them, everything should have ended by December 2013 and Massimiliano and Salvatore would have spent Christmas free at home.Certainties supported by statements sharing the Indian approach to the affair, such as those made official last May by the Deputy Foreign Minister Pistelli when, albeit badly informed about the status of the two Navy Fusiliers he called "Lagunari", he told us about the "Rules of engagement" shared and signed with India. All accompanied by the continuous assurances of dr. Staffan de Mistura on the security of a fair and rapid trial, completely borrowed on more than one occasion by the Minister of Foreign Affairs Emma Bonino, in truth, however, always very detached from the case, perhaps because she is allergic to the style of military uniforms.
A few hours after the decision that we all expect from India, the news overlaps and, as usual, many are in contradiction with each other with the aim of carrying out the disinformation action underway for 24 months focused on reiterating the guilt of our Marò and at the same time to present to the world "an India that is understanding and ready to grant". Tomorrow, almost certainly, the Supreme Court will tell us that the two Navy Fusiliers will no longer be judged for acts of terrorism, but because they are guilty of an act of violence at sea, a crime that provides for a wide range of sanctions, including the penalty of death. Capital punishment which, however, will not be applied by the "magnanimous India", providing only ten years in prison. Last night a series of news from Delhi confirmed these hypotheses.
The columnist Siddharth Varadarajan, Academician and former Hindu director declares "When the trial against the marines begins, the issue of Indian jurisdiction can be challenged by Italy", as also contemplated in the sentence of the Supreme Court of January 2013. The Italian defense - he added - he could also present a second appeal to the same Supreme Court that a year ago had stolen the case from the Kerala police ", but in this case" the times would be considerably longer ".
'' The Asian Age '' recalls that after giving the green light to NIA to prosecute Massimiliano Latorre and Salvatore Girone on the basis of his act, now the Ministry of the Interior has reviewed its position and the two Navy riflemen will be tried with a law which provides for a maximum of 10 years imprisonment and a fine.
The Times of India claims that the Ministry of the Interior has maintained the use of the Law on the suppression of piracy (His Act of 2002) by providing that the art. 3 paragraph 'a' is applied, which provides that who "commits an act of violence against a person on board a fixed platform or a ship and which endangers safe navigation of it will be punished with imprisonment for a period that can reach up to ten years and is subject to fine ".
The Indian Express, for its part, reiterates that section 302 of the Indian Penal Code will be applied against Massimiliano Latorre and Salvatore Girone, which implies a possible death sentence, even if "the possibility for the accused to be sentenced to death - concludes the newspaper - it is really low. ”However, no Indian newspaper tells us how New Delhi intends to get out of this new extremely confused situation, leaving the very important decision to which agency will be entrusted with the case pending, with a certain and obvious lengthening of the times. Dr. de Mistura gives an interview to the newspaper Il Tempo in which he reminds us that "Monday will be the day of truth" and that "Now the prosecution must discover his cards and for each of these we have the counter-moves ready". These words are reassuring, but not very concrete.In fact, if the Indian Court decides to apply the SUA while declassifying the crime from a terrorist event to an act of violence, the prosecution will not be required to discover any paper because the Indian legal system with reference to the SUA provides that whoever has to discover their papers must be the defense of the two Maròs to affirm their innocence. De Mistura also specifies that Monday 10th cannot be considered as "the day of judgment", but forgets to clarify whether the judge could accept the public prosecution's request for the revocation of the judicial entrustment to the Italian Embassy of the two Fusiliers, in which case the arrest of the two could be envisaged. He concludes the interview with the phrase “Now we must bring Girone and Latorre home with honor”.
We can not agree with these conclusions because we can not accept that we speak of honor after having acknowledged to India the undue right to judge and issue a ten-year prison sentence. Surely if all this happened the story will not be concluded with an "honorable solution" even if many will work to prove it.
Massimiliano Latorre and Salvatore Girone belong to our Armed Forces and were captured and detained in an absolutely illegitimate way by India while they were on an anti-piracy mission in the interest of the entire international community. Latorre and Girone must be returned to Italy "with honor", as the Head of State himself pointed out and then sent back to their homeland without any conviction against them and not "bearers of agreed convictions" through no better defined rules of engagement of which there was talk, only to be returned to Italy on the basis of the bilateral agreement of August 2012 on the management of Italian or Indian convicts. Anything decided tomorrow will not be an episode that will only concern Latorre and Girone. Any decision other than an immediate repatriation of the Navy Fusiliers without any charge against them, would represent, in fact, an aberrant and very dangerous precedent for all our soldiers engaged in missions abroad. If accepted by Italy, it would sanction the explicit renunciation of national sovereignty over its Armed Forces with an absolutely negative impact on the country's international role and above all on its credibility in protecting our fellow countrymen and our companies abroad.
In light of what is known, however, tomorrow in all likelihood what was shared and signed from the beginning between Italy and India will be implemented, as the Deputy Minister Pistilli told us in May, perhaps with an additional footnote to the agreement: the Fusiliers one once convicted, they will return to Italy only after exponents of the Indian government are excluded from any involvement with Finmeccanica's legal proceedings.
Another important piece of the history of our nation managed with hasty secrecy without the involvement of the public and the Parliament. History repeats itself, also the 10 November 1975 happened when Italy and Yugoslavia signed a treaty to transfer to Yugoslavia the state sovereignty over Zone B of the Free Territory of Trieste.
Perhaps the Minister of Foreign Affairs Bonino was referring to this all-Italian tradition too, when several times in recent months she referred to a Kissingerian “secret diplomacy” and has always invoked the utmost confidentiality. That same Minister who is now indignant if India decides to apply His Act anyway, as he told the press last night, saying, "Some advances coming from New Delhi today on the judicial process of our Navy riflemen leave me dumbfounded and indignant ".
Perhaps, Madam Minister, your indignation would not be such if you were exposed to support the fate of the two Italian soldiers. Rather, her choice to give the Premier the honor of the decision in a matter of primary international politics does not give her the right to be indignant.
Rather, at least he undertakes to resign on Tuesday those who until now have trusted in "fair, rapid and just" solutions and that the establishment of a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry is immediately given to ascertain the objective responsibilities of those who decided on March 22, 2013 to return our military to India, the reasons that led to this decision and why the International Arbitration was not initiated.
Fernando Termentini
