Italy of Law now belongs to the past, to the last century. It sounds strange to use words such as the ‘last century’ only three years after the end of the 20th century, yet even though this acknowledgement may make us feel older, it is the truth.
Law, real Law, the subject of endless debates among experts, which used to cause ordinary people to go to Court, not in connection with scandals but simply to listen to the pleadings of well-known attorneys and public prosecutors, no longer exists.
Courts are now crowded by reporters and onlookers in search of gossip.
The Law is dead, buried by the wrong use that is made of the laws themselves. Some Courts, some judges, no longer seek “the truth”, but only their own side of the truth, which they arrogantly defend with all the means they have available, whereas their job is to of course seek truth, but without using qualifiers or possessives.
Who knows for which strange reasons they think they are untouchable, above any other form of power, abusing their office and also interfering in the legislator’s duties, the Parliament’s in the case in point.
Debates no longer concern the interpretation of Civil or Penal Law, but infighting among the various associations on how to resists in order not to lose the powers they have autonomously awarded to themselves. However the faults and the ethic distortions are not distinguishing qualities of judges in general, but also of the political class, as represented both in the Government majority and opposition.
In Parliament, the debate on important social and political themes is dropping to increasingly low levels, taking the form of pointless and useless arguments. All this is stalemating institutions, as a result of which it is proving difficult to re-establish with clear texts (also as far as their literary format is concerned) the regulations that are to rule the country.
The literary format is important and it hence has to be clear, so as to prevent each individual judge or attorney from providing their personal interpretation.
It happens occasionally to have to look up the text of a law or of a regulation, and as a rule the text will provide references to the text of other regulations, also including laws that no one had ever thought of revoking, such as law that still prohibits the transit of people carrying a goose on their head under the gates of a town.
The deterioration experienced by our society is spreading in all directions, also involving the field in which we have worked for many years.
The Alitalia work-to-rule strike, which physicians effectively took part in, didn’t only damage citizens, because of the discomfort it produced.
Above all, it penalised the medical community.
The certificates justifying possibly inexistent diseases are the seals appended to what the real dysfunctional National Health Service is.
This saddens us all, in view of all the people who work in our sector (and there are many) who do not stoop to compromises and carry out their work aware of their dignity.
It is for these very people that we feel the need to put over to the Medical Association one single question: which corrective measures do you intend to take? We await a response which we shall publish in full.
And we trust it will be a comprehensive and exhaustive reply.

Translated by Interpres sas