Genoa – Marta Vincenzi, former mayor of Genoa, has been waging a battle for years. After the three-year sentence agreed upon for the events of the 2011 flood, you have repeatedly attacked a law that punishes administrators even for events in which there is no personal fault. A sort of objective responsibility that hovers like the sword of Damocles on all their acts, indiscriminately and without clarifying details and contexts. These are topics on which she has expressed herself with interventions and writings, aware of the fact that controversial events have happened to many Italian mayors regardless of their political position.
Yet Marta Vincenzi is perplexed when faced with the first yes to the abolition of abuse of office. She explains it this way: completely erasing the crime at the risk of giving an implicit green light to those who do not operate correctly in her roles. She would have been timely a greater analysis of the situation, which, however, appears difficult in an era in which the spirit of simplification prevails.
What is your opinion on the path that would lead to the abolition of abuse of office? The party you come from admits that there is a need for corrections but not for an all-round cancellation.
«I agree with the Democratic Party on this topic and not only for reasons of historical position. It's a position I've developed for a long time. That there are difficulties on the part of the administrators but also of the officials who have to sign and sign the documents, this is certain. And over the years it has become increasingly weighty. We needed a review.”
However, he didn't get to the tabula rasa.
«Let's start from a preliminary consideration. This review starts from the assumption that everyone has greater trust in the State and the judiciary. And this is a very delicate and very difficult to regulate situation, it has more to do with the mood, with the historical phase in which we find ourselves and we would all have the responsibility to recover this trust”.
And it is not done, following the thread of his reasoning, simply by deleting a crime from the penal code.
“Exact. From here to saying that it is abolished tout court, I find that there is a leap. A leap that does not take into account the fact that, in certain positions, when one is not a good person, not all those who hold prestigious positions behave like good people.”
Consequently, creating a regulatory vacuum of this magnitude can leave room for those who approach the governance of public affairs in an incorrect manner.
“The problem is precisely this, the fact of eliminating this crime leaves room for those who understand their role in the wrong way.”
However, it is also true that his reasoning after the judicial affair is focused on the risks that are gathering like clouds over the directors, who are attributed responsibilities beyond their ability to control and govern.
«Over the years I have seen what dangers one falls into without fault. It's right that there is a helping hand in this. But I also understood that there are spaces of borderline convenience that sometimes it is possible for someone to seize.”
There is a need to find the right balance and not to act with the cleaver.
«I believe that precisely in this area, in the trust that must be regained by everyone in public affairs, we must be very rigorous. Thus repeated once again: I would be for a careful review and not for total abolition.”
One of the objections that we often hear is this. Abuse of office is a crime that has too little character, when a magistrate finds himself faced with an unclear situation for the meantime he opens a case for abuse of office and then we'll see.
«I am convinced that in many situations this has happened but the pathology cannot be remedied by denying the existence of a possible cause. We need to eliminate the pathology, which is a slightly more complicated matter. In which I would like politics to be practiced by making some complex reasoning. Which I don't see.”
There is no capacity on the part of politics, she says, to study very detailed and complex situations.
«No, since now it's all simplification, it's all cheering or yes or no, the complexity of the situation is lost. This applies to this as well as to many other stories, including mine. However, starting from one assumption: problems must be addressed at their roots. It is not by saying that mayors must do certain things that you have solved the flooding problem.” —
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