ABSTRACT: Marco Pannella is indicted following the publication of an antimilitarist manifesto on "Radical News". Following is a letter sent by Pannella to the judges of the Court of Assizes of Rome, in which he denounces the violations of the formal law committed against him and announces he does not intend to appear before the court at the trial.

(Letter to the 3rd Court of Assizes of Rome - May 1974 from: "Marco Pannella - Works and Speeches - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

Members of the Court,

I refuse to appear before you again because I do not want to be accessory in an act of violence of the institutions against the rights of the citizen and against the often fascist legality which you are called upon to represent.

You cannot judge me under such circumstances. You have arbitrarily and illegitimately used a summary proceeding to make a summary justice, contravening the provisions of the code of criminal procedure. For identical facts, you have used penal action against me while you have omitted to do so for other people with whom I manifestly and deliberately committed these facts in the context of the campaigns for the respect of civil rights and the defence of the constitutional legality. The matter has been conducted in such a way that you have been called upon to judge and to institute proceedings during the preliminary stage of the debate, disrespecting the guaranties which the law prescribes, with the purpose of protecting your function as well. You have operated against the distribution of an antimilitarist manifesto on a party newspaper sent to members and supporters or distributed by militants, whereas you have judged the publication of the same text on a well-known extreme-Right weekly magazine, which is on sa

le at all the newsstands of Italy territory and is far more widespread, to be legitimate and characterized by the exertion of freedom of press.

In the issue of the newspaper which is the object of this trial, the Radical Party, its national direction, its qualified representatives, had manifestly urged a judicial confrontation to clarify a situation of serious, reiterated and complex constitutional illegitimacy, to interrupt it by means of a judgement, your judgement, on the eve of the fraudulent electoral campaign of 1972. According to the law, you should have judged us by 7 May of that year. The Procurator's Office of Rome on the contrary summoned me to appear on the eve of the electoral campaign for the referendum, which I was to conduct as national secretary of the major lay and pro-divorce organization involved in this difficult campaign: the Italian League for Divorce (LID. With the procedure adopted, during two long years I ignored being the object of a penal action which could not, for its very nature, fail to lead to an indictment. This has made it possible to indict me for facts committed two years ago, while I knew nothing throughout the

whole period: I never even received a notice of indictment. Since 29 March 1972, I have published hundreds of issues of newspapers, newsletters, dailies and periodicals. With such methods, without knowing it, I might be involved in hundreds of trials. This means that for each publication I should have an excellent documentation. It is simply grotesque. The president of the Court himself, in the previous hearing, made it clear that in his opinion this proceeding, even if conducted in the respect of the law (which is patently not the case of this trial), should have been dismissed.

I therefore accuse the Procurator's Office of the Republic of Rome of having taken a clearly persecutor and political attitude, whether out of incapacity, misfortune or fraud I do not wish to know. There are too many "Valpreda inquiries" going on every day in our city for us to continue remaining silent and accepting. I believe in the Republic and in the rule of the law. The force of the institutions, when it is not supported by the strictest respect of their legality itself, is nothing but violence, and the worst of violences. Fascism is nothing but institutionalized public violence. As a democrat and nonviolent, I have but one weapon: that of non-cooperation, to be used in such cases at my own risk. But armed with nonviolence, we can win many battles when a country is civilized in its people, even if it is corrupt in its leading class.

My defending counsels, lawyers De Cataldo and Mellini, longtime companions and friends, had urged me to trust you, despite the fact that I considered my defence rights irretrievably damaged. Conscious of the privilege of benefiting of their advice, I accepted to appear before you in the previous hearing.

But with an ordinance which already seems to contain a judgement of conviction, you rejected not only every possibility of proving my defence, but even the possibility of recalling to your memory and to your conscience all those facts which you cannot ignore if you want to judge me "as if" the trial were held and concluded within thirty days from the denunciation of the facts, "as if", in other words, your judgement came in the context you ignore and which it is necessary for you to know.

Until you persist in this attitude and in these opinions, the "quest for truth", after having being widely jeopardized from the beginning, will be downright impossible. I will therefore come to court, but as a citizen who has the right to witness your way of ministering justice, and certainly not as a defendant.

Consequently, I inform you that I will not appeal against your sentence. Be it a sentence of acquittal or of conviction, at this point, from a moral point of view, this trial concerns you only. But I will not allow you to have a clean conscience. For years I have been indicted with absurd charges, with theoretic risks of heavy penalties, and then you have passed "lenient" convictions as a demonstration of fairness. This is the game you have chosen to place a bothersome opponent into prison. The expedient of a minimal conviction with the benefice of probation cannot be used, because I am publicly and formally declaring that I consider the facts I am accused of not as offences but as inalienable civic rights, and this whether I have really committed them or if they are to be ascribed to others, and that I shall continue to commit them inasmuch as they are necessary to abolish and override the anticonstitutional violence of this regime, which is increasing ever more from 1972 to date.

At this point it would be logic for me to revoke my defending counsels, but I still have a small hope that this trial, thanks to their extraordinary capacities, in their efforts to investigate and reveal the truth, can become what it should be, that is, a trial against the prosecution. I therefore confirm the appointment of Mr Franco De Cataldo and Mr Mauro Mellini as my defending counsels. I will correct this decision if necessary.

As a radical and a democratic militant, I intend and need to take advantage of this trial to try to abolish the fascist norms that are so massively used. For the democratic conscience, for the supreme law of the Republic, they are already theoretically abrogated. We fight for their abrogation also in practice, to eliminate further possibilities and technical justifications for trials such as this one.

Confiding in the fact that you will agree with me at least on this point, I take the occasion to invite you once more - should you consider it appropriate - to go to the chancery of the Court to place your signatures on the request for eight popular referendums to abrogate this and other antidemocratic and anticonstitutional norms, promoted by the Radical Party and by the Italian League for Divorce. Referendums promoted precisely by those lay and progressivist organizations which, through me, you are trying to "abrogate" because they have prevented, in these years and on 12 and 13 May, the abrogation of the severe and civil law on the institution of divorce.

Yours sincerely