Outrage over the violence in Turin

The two counts of sexual assault – one against a 13-year-old girl – with which a Nepalese employee of a convenience shop on the outskirts of Turin was charged had led the public prosecutor’s office to request pre-trial detention. This was denied by the judge for preliminary investigations, who found no risk of the suspect absconding or reoffending. It is a questionable decision, and the public prosecutor’s office has asked the review court to overturn it. To gather information, the Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio, has sent in inspectors. Upholding due process, however, means remembering that pre-trial detention is not an early sentence, that the suspect remains innocent until a final judgement is handed down, and that a judge must be able to refuse detention if they consider the legal requirements to be absent.

The interesting thing is that a rather striking ideological spectacle is unfolding around this affair. On the one hand, there are the left-wing downplayers, ready to view even the mention of the suspect’s nationality with suspicion and to interpret any reference to the facts as a xenophobic reflex. On the other, there are the right-wing populists, ready to regard pre-trial detention as an automatic consequence of the seriousness of the charge and every procedural safeguard as a favour granted to the guilty party. These are two mirror-image distortions. Legal safeguards do not apply only to defendants we like, and the facts do not become irrelevant when they prove inconvenient to our political side. This also applies to the reactions of those who criticise Nordio by invoking non-existent racist impulses or forgetting that it was a public prosecutor’s office that requested pre-trial detention. Thus, the particularly heinous nature of the offences fades into the background, and the debate is replaced by a clash between rival fan groups. The rule of law, if it means anything at all, means precisely this: demanding that the law be applied equally to all, without ideological mitigating factors and without ideological aggravating factors.