ABSTRACT: The text of the leaflet distributed for the collection of signatures petitioning for ten referendums (the Cossiga Law on Public Order; Crimes of Opinion; Life Imprisonment; Hunting; Licenses to Carry Arms; Military Courts; Hashish; Abortion; Nuclear Power Plants; Demilitarising the Financial Police.

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A great demand for freedom; life which demands a new quality. And, in the face of parties more and more incapable of understanding, closed up in their usual games which interest no one, attentive only to the division of power.

There is anger against the lords of politics; there is awareness that today's decisions will help determine the future; nuclear energy; violence in political struggle; the disappointment with the left; nature, environment and resources belonging to everybody destroyed by industrial "civilisation"; the weak in the world condemned by the strong to die of starvation; the criminal waste of expenditures for war; the invasion of civilian life by the military; the defence of freedom and civil rights; the reply of democracy and an effective fight against terrorism; the will to restore ideals and the impulse to reform to political life. Today the parties, even of the left, speak only of public order to persuade us that freedom must be suppressed. And employment, pensions, the South, social assistance?

For these reasons, all these reasons, the referendums - a power which the Constitution grants us. To proclaim the right to justice against the violence of the police, of arms and of armies, against the economic violence of extermination, against abuse and oppression, against the indifference to the needs of all.

THE ALTERNATIVE PROGRAMME OF POPULAR OPPOSITION

1. THE COSSIGA LAW ON PUBLIC ORDER

We want to abrogate the recent norms on public order not as a gesture of challenge but because of a well-pondered conviction. To harshen punishment, lengthen preventive custody, bring back police detention, will not help combat terrorism but on the contrary will only aid it by strengthening the ties of social outsiders with clandestine organisations. It will not help as the Reale Law (1) has not helped. It will only serve to delay the adoption of effective and indispensable measures: the creation of a modern civil police investigation organisation, the reorganisation of justice, the enactment of the new penal code, rapid and certain justice.

2. CRIMES OF OPINION, MEETING, AND ASSOCIATION

The Fascists who worked out the 1930 penal code so jealousy conserved - and worsened - by the political parties of our Republic, had a deep conviction that ideas were to be fought with force, that certain values (property, public order, corporatism, chastity, honour, racial characteristics) had to be defended in any possible manner against "subversive" opinions and actions. Fascism deeply nourished the conviction that to preserve public order it was necessary to suppress freedom and the constitutional state. The question is still open.

3. LIFE IMPRISONMENT

The immediate reaction to barbarous slaughters - "the death penalty!" - is exploited by reactionaries, by those who invoke repression, wartime laws, military courts. Democratic justice does not consider penalties as social vindictiveness, but as tools for reinserting convicts into social life. Life imprisonment, like the death penalty, negates this principle. Let us reflect: punishments are inflicted on people already considered guilty. But the most ferocious punishments, we should ask ourselves, do they help to find the guilty? Do they help assure justice?

4. HUNTING

Hunting today is rowdy consumption, a business of thousands of billions spent for the destruction of hundreds of millions of animals supported by the arms manufacturers and the DC and PCI together with the hunting associations. Hunting has been prohibited in several countries because of the irreparable damage it does to public property, the environment in which we live and the deaths it causes since there is no possibility of surveillance (an expert policeman behind every hunter?) The artificial chickens for "restocking" are a caricature of wild animals, just in order to give the millions of hunters something to shoot at .

5. LICENSES TO CARRY ARMS

Arms merchants and supporters of violence, exploiting the illusion of self-defence through arms, are endangering civil coexistence. Democracy, founded on the principle of non-violence, is impossible in a country overflowing with arms. The general ban on carrying them is annulled by the fact that the issuing of licenses is practically unlimited which must be abolished. The police will not be disarmed (they will still have their regulation arms), but private police will be. This will facilitate police reform, making them competent to do their job under the full responsibility of the Minister of the Interior towards Parliament.

6. MILITARY COURTS

Courts composed of officers and generals rather than judges are a defeat for our democracy. The justice of the military caste is repression and not justice and as such is invoked by reactionaries for the sake of public order (along with the death sentence and the state of war). The principles of discipline and hierarchy, of obedience and military honour are the exact opposite of those of democratic justice, of the judge who is alone with his conscience and free in his interpretation of the law. The citizen in uniform must retain his fundamental rights.

7. HASHISH AND MARIJUANA

These are not drugs because they are not habit forming nor induce tolerance as is the case with alcohol and tobacco which are much more harmful. That the use of "hemp" causes madness or criminal behaviour are legends that have long been disproved. Neither do they lead to the use of heroin. There are hundreds of millions of "smokers" in the world as against a limited number of users of true drugs. Prohibition, on the other hand, has created a single black market of hemp and heroin, a true link in the passage of supply and demand. Liberalisation of "hemp" use is an indispensable measure for isolating and combating heroin.

8. ABORTION

We do not want to abolish the new law but only to remove a few dispositions to make it operative. Even with Law 194 abortion remains a crime in most cases because of a disposition which makes it obligatory for abortions to be performed almost exclusively in public hospitals which have managed to do only 170,000 out of one million in a year. For the others there are still clandestine midwives and "cucchiai d'oro" (2), knitting needles and parsley... Along with the afore-mentioned disposition a few others should be eliminated (limits to the independent decisions of women, the obligation to inform the provincial medical officer, penalties for acts which are no longer supposed to be crimes, etc.)

9. NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS

They are a fraud: there is a lack of energy and of petroleum today: we will have electricity from these plants within ten years. And then uranium is extremely scarce and highly dangerous plutonium will have to be used. Accidents are always possible: and what of earthquakes? sabotage? foreign secret services? What kind of police measures will be needed to protect the plants and the transportation of uranium? What restrictions of the union rights of the personnel working in them? There are other energy sources (solar, wind, water...) without the enormous waste of atomic energy for consumption and with a new, democratically oriented economic model.

10. DEMILITARISATION OF THE FINANCIAL POLICE

The Financial Police is an independent police force, considering its very special tasks: to fight tax evasion, the illegal exporting of capital, smuggling, drug trafficking. Why then is it composed of soldiers and commanded by a general rather than accountants, tax experts and banking experts? Why should it be concerned with public order too (are the police less dependable today?) and territorial defence (do we have no army?). This can only be explained by anti-democratic policies which subject the citizens to military powers for repressive ends.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Reale law - Refers to Reale, Oronzo (Lecce 1902), PRI secretary from 1949 - 1964, at various times Minister of Justice and author of a severe public order giving emergency powers to the police. The law intended to fight terrorism during the Red Brigades period (1975). During a referendum (1988) promoted by the Radical Party for abrogating the Reale Law, 76% of the voters were in favour of retaining it.

2) Cucchiai d'oro - Literally "golden spoons" - a reference to a spoon shaped instrument used in clandestine abortions, golden because of the high cost of such operations.