ABSTRACT: The texts that follow reconstruct the story of Pannella's resignation from Parliament; the serious problems that Pannella raised with it, together with the thick and dirty veil covering Parliament. This is what the former member of Parliament wrote to his colleagues, the reply they gave him and the problems he had raised; with the "unexpected" result of the acceptance of his resignation, Also, the comments on the event in the "Transatlantico" (1), in the press and on state television.

(Radical News n.248 of 14 November 1989)

Article 294 of the Penal Code, Paragraph III 'Concerning crimes against the citizen's political rights' states: "Any person who completely or partially prevents the exertion of a political right through violence, threat, fraud, or forces a person to exert this right in a way that differs from the person's will, is punished with one to five years of prison". Arrest is compulsory in flagrancy, the warrant arrest is optional, prosecution occurs ex officio, the jurisdiction is of the Court of Assizes. Our country's laws precisely and exhaustively provide for the crime of attempt on the citizen's civil and political rights. The fact that the whole system based on knowing before deliberating, based on the formation of the democratic process, has been carried away in a same direction convinces us, once and for all, that this ABC of political democracy is nothing but a merely canonical principle, obsolete and superficial. We must also recognize the serious symptoms, generally loose and scattered, of the establishmen

t in Italy of a regime: partyism, which is far from democracy.

The situation of the judicial order (not of the judicial power) is unwholesome: why wonder if life becomes increasingly similar to a jungle?

Constant and systematic attempts have been carried out against the citizens' civil and political rights, so that democratic fair play has been distorted and the popular will and its formative processes have been falsified, and with them, indirectly, also those of the Parliament and of the other Institutions.

We have been told that it is useless to want to be a fully republican Parliament. What are the prerogatives and the tasks of a Parliament, if not to pass laws and to give indications? But given that the Parliament passes laws and formulates and repeats certain indications, and then denounces that they are being publicly and repeatedly violated, who has maimed the Parliament and the Republic, if not that judicial order, that never charged anyone with political and institutional crimes, except in very few occasions and always against some desperate terrorist?

What does all this mean, if not an attempt that presumes the existence of a specific criminal association, aiming at attempting on citizens' civil and political rights, constantly carried out indirectly through political apportionment, but also through our daily sufferings?

It is a constant attack, successful because it is protected by the constant crimes of omission of the judicial order!

The fact that those who were systematically, officially, committing these crimes of attack against civil and political rights were never indicted has created these gangs. This magistracy has found its point of conjunction with the authority, rather than with the legal state. These were the things that would have brought chaos into a system of parties that has still not become an official regime, but simply an attack against or a degeneration of democracy.

Translator's notes

(1) "Transatlantico": name given to the long corridor in front of the Hall of the Chamber of Deputies, where members of Parliament meet and discuss informally.