Global Policy Forum

By Daniel Williams

Last Tuesday, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's legislative majority passed a controversial bill that lets defendants in criminal cases ask for a new judge if there is "legitimate suspicion" that the judge is biased against them.

Last week the first test case of the new law was filed by a lawyer and friend of Berlusconi. The lawyer is being tried for allegedly attempting to bribe judges on Berlusconi's behalf. An appeals judge rejected the request. But the rapid-fire passage and court test confirmed for many Italians that Berlusconi is using his iron majority in Parliament to pass custom-made laws to resolve legal problems related to his business empire.

Berlusconi's battles to change laws have become the defining theme of his first 17 months in office. Besides the "legitimate suspicion" rule, the Italian leader has pushed through measures to limit the use in Italian courts of evidence gathered abroad and to decriminalize convictions for false bookkeeping. Both of these issues figure in cases against him.

Besides being the head of government, Berlusconi is one of Italy's richest men, having assembled a huge media empire. During the course of that career, he was charged with a variety of financial crimes but convicted of none. Berlusconi has denied using the legislative process for his own ends. The legitimate suspicion law has a public, rather than private, benefit, he has argued. "I don't want to enter into this," he said recently. "Honest people know that it is the right of each citizen to have a judge who is not prejudiced against him."

With moves like last week's, Berlusconi is determined to put an end to a decade-old anti-corruption campaign known as Clean Hands, Italian observers say. Beginning in the early 1990s, judges and prosecutors snared dozens of politicians and their financial sponsors in corruption cases. The trials terminated the careers of a generation of political leaders. Italians by and large welcomed the Clean Hands campaign as a needed civic revolution.

Berlusconi, in contrast, has declared that Clean Hands judges and prosecutors are out to get him, and argues that the anti-corruption enterprise was a leftist plot to destroy political rivals. "It was not a revolution," he said recently, "but an attempt at political subversion. It was a dark, inquisitorial epoch."

"The Italian experience," he went on, "demonstrates that a certain type of justice has brought a political system to an end, eliminated a ruling class, and has taken from the people the ability to decide who should run the country." He was speaking on the 10th anniversary of the suicide of a Parliament member who was under investigation as part of the Clean Hands campaign.

"Berlusconi has made himself out to be a victim" of zealous Clean Hands prosecutors, said Giovanni Sartori, a professor of constitutional law. "He has effectively undermined an entire era in fighting corruption." Berlusconi critic Curzio Maltese wrote in La Repubblica newspaper that the new laws represent "the retreat from a state of law to absolutism and toward a banana republic specializing in laws made to personal order."

The new laws have drawn little outrage from the Italian public. That is a measure of general disillusionment with Italy's anti-corruption magistrates and the success Berlusconi has had in discrediting them.

When Clean Hands began a decade ago, many Italians were all for it. Bribe-taking politicians were insulted in the streets. Clean Hands prosecutors became national heroes -- one, Antonio di Pietro, was briefly Italy's most popular political figure. The Christian Democratic Party, which had dominated Italian politics since World War II, collapsed under the pressure of this scrutiny. Bettino Craxi, a prime minister from the Socialist Party, fled to Tunisia ahead of a number of corruption charges. A friend and mentor of Berlusconi's, Craxi died in exile.

The Clean Hands prosecutions dragged on for years. Although hundreds of people were charged, few were convicted. The public appeared to tire of the lengthy, inconclusive proceedings. Di Pietro entered politics and faded into obscurity.

Berlusconi created his own party and won the prime minister's post in 1994. His tenure lasted only seven months, until a minority faction deserted the coalition and brought the government down. But he remained head of his large Forza Italia party and won a resounding parliamentary majority in elections in May 2001. Voters ignored opposition charges that Berlusconi's legal problems, control of three television channels and other business interests amounted to an unacceptable conflict of interest.

Berlusconi's judicial opponents acknowledge that they are on the defensive. "With Clean Hands, we reached an exceptional point in which people felt close to justice and justice to people," said Gerardo d'Ambrosio, the chief prosecutor in Milan. "This lasted until there was a reaction to it and the magistrates were delegitimized. This campaign has destroyed a project against corruption."

Parliament passed the legitimate suspicion law in a raucous session Tuesday after months of debate, preliminary votes, rewrites and revotes. Anti-Berlusconi protesters formed human "carousels" and ringed courthouses throughout the country.

Forza Italia legislators praised the measure as a "good law for all." One legislator, Ferdinando Adornato, dismissed criticism that the bill benefited Berlusconi and accused the opposition of wanting laws equal for everyone but the prime minister. "Often, personal issues signal that something is not right in justice," he said.

The measure directly applies to a trial that centers on charges that Berlusconi and a lawyer, Cesare Previti, passed bribes to judges in Rome to influence a ruling in a dispute involving Berlusconi and another businessman. During the trial, prosecutors alleged that Previti, a minister in Berlusconi's first government, kept $15 million in kickbacks in Swiss bank accounts. Previti acknowledged hiding the accounts from Italian tax authorities. "I don't think I am required to explain everything about my own business," he told the Milan court.

Berlusconi has been acquitted in several other cases of alleged corruption. On Tuesday, another case against him involving alleged fraudulent bookkeeping was dropped when the statute of limitations ran out. In that case, the prosecution alleged that in 1992, Berlusconi's Milan soccer team paid another club $5 million under the table for a player. The frequent delays in Italy's court system can mean the death of cases, and critics of the legitimate suspicion measure contend the new law will only obstruct justice. The opposition boycotted the vote. "You wanted this law -- vote for it yourself," Marco Boato, a Green party lawmaker, shouted during the parliamentary session.

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