No step back, we're not overstepping says ANM

(ANSA) - ROME, NOV 6 - Magistrates union ANM said Wednesday the Italian judiciary would not take a step back in its actions since it was not overstepping the mark and encroaching on politics as Justice Minister Carlo Nordio contended earlier in the day.
    ANM President Giusueppe Santalucia said the government should not call them communists, as Deputy Premier and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini has done, whenever there was a ruling the executive didn't like, as in recent verdicts on the government's controversial new project of sending a select few migrants to Albania to be processed.
    "(There's been) no encroachment, we are not waging war on anyone," said Santalucia.
    "For our part, we cannot retreat in the exercise of our profession, we make provisions that have a solid and reasoned motivation.
    "After that, they can be challenged or contested and there are the appropriate places to do it.
    "But thinking of having to take a step back in the exercise of one's jurisdiction is something that is neither here nor there.
    "We ask that you should not cry communism every time a court says something that you don't like.
    "I have no inkling of all these communists in the judiciary".
    Nordio said earlier on Wednesday that part of the judiciary has been meddling in politics for decades and argued that the time has come for magistrates to butt out.
    "There was a second phase to 'Clean Hands'," Nordio said at the 'Salone della Giustizia' fair in Rome referring to the corruption scandal of the early 1990s that brought down Italy's post-war political establishment.
    "Due to a demotion of politics, the judiciary actually took its place and, from that moment on, many political decisions were influenced by the judiciary, which allowed itself to criticise laws.
    "In an ideal country, magistrates should not criticise the law and politicians should not criticise judgments. But after 'Clean Hands' this situation was reversed.
    "Now we need to understand who should be the first to take a step backwards, but since this 'flood' started with the judiciary, they should be the ones to do it".
    The "flood" Nordio mentioned may have been his way of referring to a number of recent decisions by courts that have come under flak from the government for allegedly encroaching on the political realm.
    These include a Rome court's decision last month to nix the detention of the first group of migrants taken to the newly opened Italian-run facilities in Albania on the grounds, based on an October 4 decision taken by the European Court of Justice, that their countries of provenance were not wholly safe.
    Another was the subsequent decision by a Bologna court to refer a government measure with a list of 19 'safe countries', a bid to overcome the legal hurdle to its Albanian migrants centres becoming operative, to the European Court of Justice.
    The Bologna judges asked the EU court whether the principle of the primacy of EU law should prevail if a conflict arises with Italian legislation in relation to an appeal presented by an asylum seeker from Bangladesh.
    Santalucia, the ANM chief, said last week that the Italian judiciary is unable to work with serenity because of repeated claims from members of the ruling coalition that some of its decisions are politically motivated.
    Nordio added on Wednesday that the government will press ahead with plans to separate the career paths of prosecutors and judges so that it is no longer possible to switch between roles - a move the ANM has criticised. (ANSA).