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Italy's Court of Last Appeal (Corte di Cassazione) has already featured once or twice in these pages for its, shall we say, interpretative approach to the law. They seem to feature on the front pages of newspapers every third day, and rarely for their wisdom. Now a journalist has just made a collection of the most interesting sentences. Here are a few:
Are kindergarten children allowed to have a wee? Yes, and they do not even need adult supervision, so long as adults know where they are. (To be honest, the guilt for this falls largely on the idiot who pushed it as far as the country's highest court. The mind boggles at the thought of the expense and time; by now, the child in question is probably getting his PhD.)
A priest who says Mass at the wrong time must reimburse the faithful who turned up too early or too late. How, it is not clear.
It is permitted to lie to the Carabinieri if you are doing so to cover up for your lover and you yourself are married.
Calling someone pirla (Milanese for "dimwit") is criminal defamation. On the other hand, to call a defaulting colleague a "black moron", emphasis on "black", is not racist if there are sufficient reasons to be angry at him. That there could be sufficient reasons for calling someone a dimwit does not seem to come into play. And to make the labyrinth of the law on defamation more complete, it turns out that it is not permissible to call your wife a "whore" during a marital row, even if you happen to know that before your marriage that is exactly what she was. The bigger the truth, evidently, the bigger the libel. The court, the journalist observes, did not say whether the husband was allowed to hold out a fifty-euro note.
If an evicted tenant insists on not leaving, it is perfectly lawful for the landlord to throw stones at the flat till the windows break.
A married woman used to have her lover in the home and in her marital bed. Bad idea. The judges ruled that the husband had a right to "revoke the gift" of the furniture he had bought for her, including the bed, because specifically of the personal insult of taking the boyfriend there.
This one I rather like. An unnamed but immensely rich person found that people wanting to reach a public beach took a shortcut through his estate. The judges ruled that since the beach was public, and since the shortcut was in fact the only way there, the VIP had to allow the proles through and like it. This, by the way, is an absolute legal right: "No kind of private property, for any reason whatever, can prevent the community from reaching a certain beach, if that is the sole access to it."
If you have evidence on film that your employee has punched the clock and then left the premises to do whatever he pleased, not only can you not sack the bastard, but you are in danger of prosecution for violating the right to privacy.
To pat a woman's backside is sexual harassment - unless it is the boss who does so. The Court ruled that there was no evidence to ascribe a "motive of lust" to the boss. This one was directly contradicted by a later sentence on a similar matter. I have a feeling that the two different sentences may reflect different opinions among the learned judges as to the sexual attractiveness of the two plaintiffs.
The wife is a Jehova's Witness. The husband is not. They disagree about the education of their children. The disagreement turns physical. Very physical indeed - the evidence speaks of slaps and bites on both sides. The judges refuse to blame either party: religious disagreement, apparently, justifies violence on both sides. And if they had disagreed on the children's education without religion being involved?
To have sex in an elevator is not public obscenity, unless the elevator is the old-fashioned kind with glass walls.
A member of the military police, the Carabinieri, can be dismissed for being unfaithful to his wife - or, one supposes, husband. But that is specific to the Carabinieri, whose honourability is a special public patrimony. So, if you are a Carabiniere and tempted, get yourself reassigned to another branch of the armed forces or of the public administration. (To be fair, the accused was also guilty of breach of discipline - he had answered back pretty forcefully to his own sergeant who was advising him to put an end to an all too visible affair. In which case, speaking as an ex-forces person myself, I would say that the soldier should have been dismissed not for infidelity, but for insanity.)
To be called a Fascist is criminal defamation. To be called a Communist isn't.
A truly dreadful one, to show that this is not just about funny. A complaint of rape cannot be upheld, according to the learned judges, if the plaintiff wore tight jeans, since "experience shows" that women's tight jeans cannot be removed without cooperation by the wearer. I will let my female friends comment on this one.
And to prove that judicial dementia is not limited to Italy, here is a gem from the corresponding German Court. A Sardinian-born waiter who abducted, raped and tortured his former lover got his sentence reduced because "his cultural background had to be taken into account". Italians are rapists by nature, it seems, they cannot be blamed for it.
Are kindergarten children allowed to have a wee? Yes, and they do not even need adult supervision, so long as adults know where they are. (To be honest, the guilt for this falls largely on the idiot who pushed it as far as the country's highest court. The mind boggles at the thought of the expense and time; by now, the child in question is probably getting his PhD.)
A priest who says Mass at the wrong time must reimburse the faithful who turned up too early or too late. How, it is not clear.
It is permitted to lie to the Carabinieri if you are doing so to cover up for your lover and you yourself are married.
Calling someone pirla (Milanese for "dimwit") is criminal defamation. On the other hand, to call a defaulting colleague a "black moron", emphasis on "black", is not racist if there are sufficient reasons to be angry at him. That there could be sufficient reasons for calling someone a dimwit does not seem to come into play. And to make the labyrinth of the law on defamation more complete, it turns out that it is not permissible to call your wife a "whore" during a marital row, even if you happen to know that before your marriage that is exactly what she was. The bigger the truth, evidently, the bigger the libel. The court, the journalist observes, did not say whether the husband was allowed to hold out a fifty-euro note.
If an evicted tenant insists on not leaving, it is perfectly lawful for the landlord to throw stones at the flat till the windows break.
A married woman used to have her lover in the home and in her marital bed. Bad idea. The judges ruled that the husband had a right to "revoke the gift" of the furniture he had bought for her, including the bed, because specifically of the personal insult of taking the boyfriend there.
This one I rather like. An unnamed but immensely rich person found that people wanting to reach a public beach took a shortcut through his estate. The judges ruled that since the beach was public, and since the shortcut was in fact the only way there, the VIP had to allow the proles through and like it. This, by the way, is an absolute legal right: "No kind of private property, for any reason whatever, can prevent the community from reaching a certain beach, if that is the sole access to it."
If you have evidence on film that your employee has punched the clock and then left the premises to do whatever he pleased, not only can you not sack the bastard, but you are in danger of prosecution for violating the right to privacy.
To pat a woman's backside is sexual harassment - unless it is the boss who does so. The Court ruled that there was no evidence to ascribe a "motive of lust" to the boss. This one was directly contradicted by a later sentence on a similar matter. I have a feeling that the two different sentences may reflect different opinions among the learned judges as to the sexual attractiveness of the two plaintiffs.
The wife is a Jehova's Witness. The husband is not. They disagree about the education of their children. The disagreement turns physical. Very physical indeed - the evidence speaks of slaps and bites on both sides. The judges refuse to blame either party: religious disagreement, apparently, justifies violence on both sides. And if they had disagreed on the children's education without religion being involved?
To have sex in an elevator is not public obscenity, unless the elevator is the old-fashioned kind with glass walls.
A member of the military police, the Carabinieri, can be dismissed for being unfaithful to his wife - or, one supposes, husband. But that is specific to the Carabinieri, whose honourability is a special public patrimony. So, if you are a Carabiniere and tempted, get yourself reassigned to another branch of the armed forces or of the public administration. (To be fair, the accused was also guilty of breach of discipline - he had answered back pretty forcefully to his own sergeant who was advising him to put an end to an all too visible affair. In which case, speaking as an ex-forces person myself, I would say that the soldier should have been dismissed not for infidelity, but for insanity.)
To be called a Fascist is criminal defamation. To be called a Communist isn't.
A truly dreadful one, to show that this is not just about funny. A complaint of rape cannot be upheld, according to the learned judges, if the plaintiff wore tight jeans, since "experience shows" that women's tight jeans cannot be removed without cooperation by the wearer. I will let my female friends comment on this one.
And to prove that judicial dementia is not limited to Italy, here is a gem from the corresponding German Court. A Sardinian-born waiter who abducted, raped and tortured his former lover got his sentence reduced because "his cultural background had to be taken into account". Italians are rapists by nature, it seems, they cannot be blamed for it.
