Highlight 25/2021 – A 13-year prison sentence for the pro-migrant Italian mayor Domenico Lucano : the endless conundrum on lawfulness and justice.
Chiara Camoletto, 21 October 2021
Last week, the tiny village of Riace, in the Southern region of Calabria, has once again made headlines in Italy and abroad. This town is known for its welcoming policy for migrants, set up by its mayor, Domenico Lucano, during his tenure between 2004 and 2018. Three years ago, Mr Lucano was arrested for taking advantage of government funds for refugees, a programme later drastically curtailed when Matteo Salvini’s right-wing party took power.
Despite the prosecutor requesting a 7-year sentence, Mr Lucano has been handed a 13-year jail sentence by the local lower court.
To understand this ruling and before siding with Mr Lucano or with the judges, it is important to grasp the legal grounds that led to this verdict and to reflect upon the mayor’s motives.
In the 90’s Riace had become a highly depopulated village, mostly inhabited by the elderly and boasting a record number of empty and abandoned houses. Lack of opportunities and high unemployment rates had prompted the younger generation to move to Northern Italy or to the Americas. At the same time, due to inadequate prospects, instability, conflicts in Africa, Italy has become a safe harbour for hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants and refugees.
Domenico Lucano himself came back to his home town from the richer North in 1998. He established an unconventional model: as a mayor, he revamped the houses that Riace’s younger generation had left or abandoned when migrating. Then he set up a housing programme transforming those dwellings into a shelter for the migrants. He created local craftmanship cooperatives for skills development intended for them. He even put in place a door-to-door recyclable waste collection thanks to a Ghana migrant who could easily ride the village cobblestone’s streets with his donkey cart. Finally, he invented a local currency that people could exclusively use shopping or buying in Riace, boosting the village economy and allowing the reopening of shops. In a few years, Riace became a dynamic little village thanks to the migrants contribution to local life.
All this was possible through a daily 35-euro government fund for each refugee, that Mr Lucano managed to obtain and allocate in the way he deemed to be most beneficial to the model he had invented. Allegedly, at times this resorted to false accounting and to pleasing other local stakeholders in exchange for their complacency towards migrants.
In 2010 Mr Lucano was named third best mayor in the world by the World Mayor Prize and in 2016 the Fortune magazine ranked him among the 50 most influential world leaders. Still, Mr Lucano lives in poverty. The suspension of the funding for Riace was ordered in 2017 by the right-wing government who decided to clamp down on migration. Subsequently, Mr Lucano was arrested for abetting illegal immigration, embezzlement and false accounting. On the day he was arrested, his bank account showed a 9-euro balance. Luckily, he did not need to pay his lawyer, because former mayor of Milan and MEP Giuliano Pisapia offered him legal defence, being himself a well-known lawyer.
The Italian Code of Criminal Procedure provides two successive appellate instances, first before the Court of Appeal and then before the Court of Cassation, so Mr Lucano’s future now rests on his lawyers firm intention to appeal.
Mr Lucano proponents argue that he is the victim of judicial harassment (he has been suspended from his office and barred from Riace since his arrest), that his humanitarian motives should have prevailed in the judges’ decision. Domenico Lucano has never denied having put human rights (right to life, right to education, right to housing etc.) before the respect for public institutions and the law. His opponents see him as a public official who allegedly ignored the law, someone who considered himself above the law in the best scenario, a corrupt politician and the champion of radical-chic in the worst one. The sentence can thus be seen as extremely severe or exemplary.
The judges have premised their decision on uncontroverted grounds related to mismanagement of public funds and not on incitement to illegal immigration, but the judgment has sparked outrage in the political and public sphere for its rigour. It has revived the long-standing debate on the relationship between law and justice. Is justice limited only to the application of law? Should the judges perform their duties with a strict formalistic approach or should they bring context to the cases that are referred to them, construing them from the reality in which they unfolded?
During this wait for the judge’s detailed motivation of the judgement, which will be disclosed in three months, one cannot help taking sides in this matter.
From a governance point of view, Domenico Lucano represents local power, and perhaps civil society, taking precedence over rules and regulations in the name of hospitality, solidarity and, particularly, humanity. He may have considered himself above the law, but with the model he envisioned his ends always justified the means, the latter representing inherent universal values. He never stopped defending his ideals, persuaded as he was that the decisions he made were right. He offered rest, hope and shelter to thousands of migrants after a hellish journey. For this reason alone, the ends may well have justified the means. Summum ius, summa iniuria.
Chiara Camoletto, A 13-year prison sentence for the pro-migrant Italian mayor Domenico : the endless conundrum on lawfulness and justice, Highlight 25/2021, available at www.meig.ch
The views expressed in the MEIG Highlights are personal to the author and neither reflect the positions of the MEIG Programme nor those of the University of Geneva.