Explosive Verdict

In the village of Romlino last week, unschooled Communist peasants, long forbidden to put up tendentious signs, jubilantly pasted up a wall poster that said simply: "We put this up just for the hell of it." Italy's Communists were not the only ones celebrating the explosive first verdict of Italy's spanking new Constitutional Court.

Until last week it was one of Italy's bitter national jokes that, although the constitution adopted by the fledgling Italian republic in 1947 bristles with democratic safeguards and guarantees of civil liberties, the only section of the constitution ever truly enforced is Article 12, which specifies that the national flag shall be green, white and red.

For nearly a decade successive Italian governments, in flagrant violation of the constitution, have blandly retained authoritarian law codes inherited from monarchial and Fascist days. Of the 708 articles of Italian law dealing with public security, all but 30 were originally decreed by Mussolini. Under them Italy's police enjoy such powers as those of forbidding citizens to change their city of residence, of banishing people to remote spots like Sardinia (or Eboli), and of seizing for trial all those who "publicly offend against the honor or dignity of the government." To defend the government's retention of these Fascist laws, Christian Democratic leaders from the late Alcide de Gasperi on pointed to the internal Communist threat to Italian democracy. Simultaneously, the Demo-Christians quietly stalled all moves to establish a court similar to the U.S. Supreme Court, as the constitution specified. So long as there was no such court, nobody could strip the government of its powers.

No longer in fear of an armed Communist takeover, the Parliament last Decemher finally brought the court into being, under pressure from President Giovanni Gronchi. On the evening of the day he was inaugurated as president of the court, 78-year-old Enrico de Nicola called his colleagues into session to consider several score of cases involving alleged violations of constitutional rights.

Last week, ruling simultaneously on 29 of the cases, De Nicola and his colleagues unanimously decided that Article 113 of the police law, which requires police permits for all signs, posters, and even "inscriptions carved into rocks," is a violation of the constitutional guarantee of free speech. In so doing, the court made clear that it had only begun to strike down unconstitutional laws, flatly urged the government to begin a wholesale revamping of Italian legal codes on its own. Predicted one happy lawyer: "In ten years Italy will be a really democratic country."

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