Italy found guilty of using torture during G8 protest

In a landmark judgment, the European Court of Human Rights yesterday found Italy guilty of using “torture” against protesters at the G8 Summit in Genoa 2001.

The court also expressed its regret that, due to both Italy’s extensive Statute of Limitations legislation and to a “lack of co-operation from police authorities”, no police personnel had been sanctioned or prosecuted for their role in the “totally gratuitous” violence perpetrated on the “No Global” protest movement.

Yesterday’s ruling in Strasbourg relates to the infamous events during the G8 when police raided the Diaz-Pertini school complex in Genoa on the night of July 21st, 2001.

After three turbulent days, marked both by violent protests from an ill-defined minority of protesters calling themselves "Black Bloc" and also by the killing of one protester, Carlo Giuliani, shot in the street by a policeman, tensions between security forces and the No Global movement were extremely high.

Some 400 police staged a midnight raid on the Diaz school where 93 protesters were sleeping. All 93 were arrested and taken to Bolzaneto prison but first the police used “gratuitous” and extreme violence against young men and women, many of whom were asleep on the school floor.

Fractured skulls

More than 60 of the protesters were injured, some seriously as they suffered fractured skulls, broken ribs, loss of teeth and much else besides.

The case heard in Strasbourg was brought against Italy by Arnaldo Cestaro, a then 62-year-old member of the leftist party Rifondazione Comunista. He was severely beaten by the police in the school, suffering a broken arm, a broken leg and 10 broken ribs.

The court ruled he had been kicked and beaten with batons in an action that “bore no relationship to the man’s behaviour”. Such gratuitous violence amounted to “torture”, ruled the court, which awarded Mr Cestaro some €45,000 in compensation.

The ruling also stated: “The response of the Italian authorities was inadequate . . . particularly because the police were allowed, with impunity, to refuse the competent authorities the necessary collaboration in order to identify the policemen who were involved in the acts of torture.”

The Court also regretted that no individual policeman or policewoman had been convicted at any of the subsequent Diaz trials in Italy in relation to “specific acts of violence”.

When the so-called Bolzaneto trial was first heard in 2008, 15 police officials were found guilty of having used “various types of violence on the detained protesters”.

By the time the case came to the Supreme Court in June 2013, nearly all the accusations had been rendered invalid by the statute of limitations. Yesterday’s ruling also pointed out that Italy lacked legislation that punished acts of torture and other violations of human rights statutes.

The Genoa G8 protests remain a black page in the copybook of the then recently-installed, Silvio Berlusconi-led, centre-right government of the day. In particular, commentators have long speculated on the role at Genoa of Mr Berlusconi's deputy prime minister Gianfranco Fini, a former MSI neofascist, who was present in the police control room during the protests.