Luciano Canfora, emeritus professor of Greek and Latin philology at the University of Bari, will have to face trial on charges of defamation against Giorgia Meloni. The judge of the Bari court, Antonietta Guerra, ordered his indictment in the afternoon “having found that in-depth evidential integration is necessary, incompatible with the pre-trial hearing”.
The first hearing will take place on 7 October in front of the single-member court of the Apulian capital. The defender Michele Laforgia had asked to acquit the accused because the fact does not exist or because it does not constitute a crime or because it is not punishable for the exercise of the right of political criticism. The prime minister filed a civil action and requested damages of 20 thousand euros.
The historian and philologist was denounced by the prime minister for defamation for some sentences uttered in April 2022, when the leader of the Brothers of Italy herself was a parliamentarian: Canfora is charged with the aggravating circumstance of having committed the act against a public official in exercise of its functions.
The “incriminating” sentences were pronounced in the Fermi scientific high school in Bari in front of an audience of 150 students plus another 100 connected via video conference, during a meeting on the war between Russia and Ukraine. Canfora, in a passage on Ukrainian neo-Nazis, speaking of the FdI leader, you said that she was “a poor thing” and that “she is usually treated like a very dangerous lunatic” and “neo-Nazi at heart”.
According to civil party lawyer Luca Libra of the Vercelli Bar, Canfora «without any justification, damaged the honour, decorum and reputation of the offended party, Honorable Giorgia Meloni, attacking, even more, his image, as a person and character political, with gratuitous and unprecedented vulgarity, using vulgar epithets, unpredictable and extemporaneous, which have seriously undermined the intimate and private sphere, as well as the moral and personal heritage of the offended person himself”. The words spoken by the university professor, concludes the lawyer Libra, are “absolutely and peacefully extraneous to the topic of the meeting”, therefore constituting “illicit conduct”.
“The prime minister will certainly be called to testify in court,” explained the lawyer Michele Laforgia. «It was also explicit in our defense – added the lawyer – that if we had had to delve into the topic of “neo-Nazism in the soul” on the merits, it would have been necessary to hear the person offended by the crime, the plaintiff, and acquire a significant mass of documents biographical, bibliographical, autobiographical, which obviously cannot be acquired in a preliminary or pre-trial hearing, which instead must be acquired in the cross-examination of the parties which is the natural venue”. And he concluded: «Then I remain convinced that a trial for a political judgment for defamation cannot be done, should not be done, and that it is very inappropriate to do it when there is state power on the other side, because the president of the council is a representative of a state power, but this belongs to a sphere that does not belong only to the juridical one, of course, not even just judicial”.