Following the Ocean Viking affair, a new dispute has broken out between the Italian and French governments. Italy is demanding the extradition of ten former Red Brigade terrorists from France to stand trial, but France has refused to deport them, much to the dismay of Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini.
The eight men and two women have been on French soil for a long time. Guilty of attacks and murders committed in the 1970s and 1980s, they found refuge in France under the socialist president, François Mitterrand. During his term in office, he systematically refused all requests for the extradition of terrorists to Italy. Some faced life sentences if they were to return.
In 2020, Rome renewed its extradition request, which was validated by Emmanuel Macron in 2021. He had agreed to the extradition of these ten terrorists, members of the Red Brigades, and various armed groups. Initially, in June 2022, the Court of Appeal opposed the extradition on the grounds of respect for the right to private and family life and the right to a fair trial, as provided for in Articles 8 and 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. On Tuesday, March 28th, the Court of Cassation upheld the Court of Appeal’s ruling to refuse to return the ten Italian far-left terrorists to their country of origin.
Matteo Salvini—Giorgia Meloni’s ally, vice-president of the Council, interior minister and leader of the national right-wing Lega party—condemned the court’s ruling, which closes the case he had been following for the past few years. In 2019, when he was minister of the interior in the coalition government of Giuseppe Conte, he was requesting to personally meet with Emmanuel Macron to obtain their extradition: “I am ready to go to Paris to meet Macron, if it can be useful to bring these murderers back to Italy,” he tweeted at the time. These terrorists are indeed taking Italy back to a painful period, known as the ‘years of lead’: between 1970 and 1990, their attacks killed nearly a thousand people in Italy.
Matteo Salvini strongly criticised France’s procedure of expelling migrants back to Italy but not terrorists: “It rejects us [sic] children at the Ventimiglia border in the woods and keeps terrorists who should be in jail in Italy.” Matteo Salvini points to the fact that the French police have a frequent habit of sending back migrants, who try to cross from Italy to France through the Alps in Provence. But returning terrorists to Italy is blocked by French justice—despite, in this case, Emmanuel Macron’s personal support for extradition.
The decision of the French courts is very badly perceived in Italy. “I ask France, ‘what if the same thing had happened in reverse with the Bataclan victims?’,” says Roberto Della Rocca, a survivor of the Red Brigades attacks and president of the Victims of Terrorism’s National Association.
Beyond the trial of the Italian terrorists, Italy has used this incident to once again criticise the laxity towards migration that prevails in France.
