Abstract
The author, first of all, describes the provisions of the Italian Constitution concerning foreigners and explains some of the leading interpretations of those provisions at the time of the first rulings of the Constitution Court concerning foreigners’ rights (1967). Then he underlines the Constitutional Court judgements concerning foreigners until 1998. In those decisions the Court gave a sensible but careful interpretation of the Constitution stressing that only the “Inviolable Rights of Man” (Article 2) are granted to everybody. The author draws attention to the fact that at the end of the 1990s the law no. 40 of March 6, 1998 and the Decree no. 286 of July, 25 1998 afforded to the foreigners present at the border or within the State’s territory “the Fundamental Rights of Man”: a concept larger than that of Article 2. In other words, the Legislator assigned to the Constitutional Court and to the ordinary courts the tasks of identifying, case by case, which of the rights of the foreigners are liable to be qualified as “fundamental”.
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Notes
- 1.
See the meeting of the first Subcommittee on 9 September 1946 and, in particular, the contributions of MPs Dossetti and Togliatti. On this aspect, see also A. Baldassarre’s extensive article on Diritti inviolabili in Baldassarre (1989, 10 et seq.).
- 2.
First Amendment, US Constitution (1791).
- 3.
Article 21, Swiss Constitution (2002).
- 4.
“Grundrechte und Grundpflichten der Deutschen”.
- 5.
Esposito (1954a, 23 et seq.). On p. 20 the author gives a list of constitutional enunciations based on natural law. Esposito viewed the justification for the reference to “men” in Article 49 GG in a similar vein, i.e. that the natural law basis of some of the rights recognised in the Grundgesetz appeared as given.
- 6.
Ibid., cit., 24 (note 19). Esposito (1954a, 221 et seq.)
- 7.
- 8.
See Articles 18 et seq, 209 et seq., in the Consolidated Law on Public Order no. 773 of 18 June 1931.
- 9.
See the list reproduced in Calò (1994, 290 et seq.).
- 10.
In favour of this conclusion see also Paladin (1998, 564).
- 11.
- 12.
As Onida recalls “…only for those who boast ancestors of Italian blood (Article 4.1 and Article 9.1.a), Law 91/1992] or for those who marry an Italian citizen (Article 1.11, Law 94/2009) is the process facilitated, while for other foreigners the acquisition of citizenship is nowadays conditional upon 10 years of legal residence (Article 9.2.f), (Law 91/1992) and on their having completed a lengthy bureaucratic process which de facto brings the time required to at least 12 years (Article 3 of Presidential Decree 362/1994)” (Onida 2010, 21).
- 13.
For example Sandel, who admits the importance of ethnicity as an ontological prius of the concept of nation, even as it rightly affirms that the Nation-State does not constitute the faithful and uniform projection of ethnic origin (Sandel 1996, 117 cited by De Fiores, 2005, 371 et seq., 388 et seq.).
- 14.
For example Bilancia (2008, 224 et seq).
- 15.
Constitutional Court judgment no. 120/1967, followed by judgment no. 104/1969. The ordinary Courts confirmed this line of interpretation: see the Court of Cassation, Civil Division, Section I, judgment no. 2265 of 4 March 1988, which deemed that the foreign worker is entitled to the same salary “proportionate” to the work and “sufficient for a free and dignified existence”, guaranteed to Italian workers.
- 16.
This interpretation was later confirmed in a series of rejections. See for example, judgements nos. 144/1970, 109/1974, 244/1974 and 46/1977.
- 17.
The Court’s conclusion actually far exceeded its premises, and ends by favouring the journalist who comes from a totalitarian system over one from a democratic one. The disavowal, in the country of origin, of democratic liberties constitutes the objective premise for obtaining asylum, but does not guarantee the “refugee” greater rights than those recognised by Article 10.2 of the Constitution to other foreigners.
- 18.
While brief, it is worth recalling the review of case law compiled by M. Luciani (1992a, 224 et seq.)
- 19.
In favour of the thesis see Modugno (1995).
- 20.
In reality there are those who still support the restrictive interpretation of the phrase “fundamental rights” (for example, Grossi 2008, 1 et seq.), but the thesis identifying fundamentality with inviolability and vice versa prevails (in this sense, see for all Baldassarre (1996, 63 et seq.); Caretti 2005, XIX ) or those who claim that the fundamentality of the rights of freedom derive from this, that they are like a “legal foundation at once of the civil society, the political society and of the State” (see again Baldassarre (1976, 295)). Finally, there are those scholars who say that the fundamentality of a right presupposes its universality, for example, Ferrajoli (2001, 6), and that accordingly this qualification should be restricted only to the classic personal rights of liberty. Revelatory of the gradual overcoming of the category of “inviolability” is that already in 1976 the Annual Conference of the Catholic Jurists’ Union was entitled Fundamental Human Rights, Giuffrè, Milan, 1977, despite the fact that the reference in the Constitution to the inviolable rights of man were due to the efforts in the Constituent Assembly of the Catholic jurists. Equally significant, in the same sense, is P. Costa’s article on fundamental rights which makes no allusion whatsoever to inviolable rights (Costa 2008, 365).
- 21.
The position of the commas, however, means that it is not entirely clear whether the phrase “over time” refers to the clause that precedes it (“Rights of freedom, and the social rights, which our legal system has matured over time …”) or is instead linked to the final phrase (“…over time must be extended to all immigrants.”).
- 22.
In a similar vein, see judgment no. 10/1993, mentioned earlier.
- 23.
Reported in the Corriere delle Sera, on 10 August 2009. This last group of immigrants from the sea and Mediterranean routes appears to have increased in recent months, owing to demographic pressures in sub-Saharan Africa and from the southern shores of the Mediterranean, in addition to the worsening food and economic crisis.
- 24.
See, most recently Pugiotto (2010, 333). Pugiotto advances the following proposals: (1) the fixing of more realistic entry quotas to be planned obligatorily each year (while today, after the Bossi-Fini law, the government can decide to annul any inflow) rather than periodic amnesties (which only fuel more irregularity, affecting those who are excluded from the amnesty provision); (2) the abrogation of the crime of illegal immigration which (in addition to classifying irregular and clandestine immigration in the same category as foreigners who commit crime) is destined to trigger a surge in the number of persons to be expelled; (3) the possibility of regularizing in itinere the foreigner’s irregular status at previously established legal conditions (thereby avoiding the current compression of the irregular immigrant with the clandestine one); (4) the extension of the agreements of readmission with the home countries (making them conditional upon the respect of the fundamental rights of the repatriated foreigner)” (Pugiotto 2010, 393 et seq.).
- 25.
In this sense, see Esposito, writing well before the present phenomenon exploded, Esposito (1959, 225).
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Pace, A. (2013). From the Rights of Citizen to the Fundamental Rights of Man: The Italian Experience. In: Arnold, R. (eds) The Universalism of Human Rights. Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4510-0_16
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