The Attorney General’s Office overturns the Court of Appeal’s ruling on Ilva: no to the closure of the hot area

Taranto. “Halting production at Ilva without having demonstrated the existence of a concrete and present danger to the Ionian community may constitute what the companies have defined as irreversible damage”. These words do not come from the government or the trade unions, but from Deputy Public Prosecutors Giuseppe Fichera and Stanislao De Matteis, Deputy Attorney General Giulio Romano and Advocate General Luigi Birritteri, in the opinion submitted by the Attorney General’s Office ahead of the Court of Cassation hearing on 20 October, which is due to rule on the legality of the order by which the Milan Court of Appeal requested the suspension of Ilva’s hot area.

The Supreme Court’s ruling was brought forward “in view of the interests at stake in the dispute, which affect fundamental rights – as stated in the order setting the hearing date – and the significance of the contested ruling”. The Milan judges upheld the request by the ‘Genitori tarantini’ association, ordering production to be halted by 25 October, primarily for two reasons: the presence of 2 tonnes of asbestos in the factory and the lack of emission limits for fine particulate matter. However, the Public Prosecutor at the Court of Cassation is now challenging the Milan court’s decision: “The obligation to suspend operations presupposes that ‘serious and significant’ dangers to the environment and human health have been identified”, but “the Court of Appeal, on the other hand, inferred these from epidemiological data relating to periods long past, from the mere existence of monitoring requirements and from a production scenario that is no longer current”. To assert the contrary would mean rendering null and void the adjustments made by ArcelorMittal as required by the BAT (Best Available Techniques).

With regard to the presence of asbestos, sealed within the blast furnaces, according to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Court of Appeal did not establish that, during the production cycle, fibres are or could be emitted into the external environment. It therefore inferred that the substance posed a danger purely in the abstract”. As for emissions, according to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, “the trial court erred in using the VDS reports drawn up up to 2023, attributing to them a clearly ‘predictive’ value, as if, from an examination of the overall state of health of the affected population recorded between 2017 and 2023, a certain prognosis could be drawn regarding the existence of a ‘serious and significant’ danger to public health in the year 2026. Without taking into account, however, that from 30 January 2025 onwards, Health Damage Assessments are no longer required, but only the Health Impact Assessment carried out by Ilva itself with the advice of the Higher Institute of Health”. For years, a section of the political establishment, led by M5S Vice-President Mario Turco, has campaigned for the Health Impact Assessment (VIS), and now that it exists (and confirms that the health impact is acceptable), they are disregarding it. According to the Public Prosecutor, the Court then “deemed compliance with the air quality standards laid down by law to be irrelevant and imposed the introduction of further limits without identifying either the legislation that would require them or the criteria by which to determine them”. It is as if a traffic warden were to tell you that you must reduce your speed, but did not tell you by how much.

Beyond the technicalities, the Attorney General’s opinion reveals something more important: that it was possible to challenge the decree of the Milan Court of Appeal. And it is the judiciary itself that has done so, whereas it should have been the government, politicians, trade unions and industrialists. In 2012, when the investigating magistrate seized the hot area, they brought the city to a standstill. This led to the decrees which, by designating Ilva a site of national strategic interest, granted the right to use the hot area even whilst it remained under seizure. Those seals have never been removed in the 14 years since. Yet the hot area has continued to operate until the special commissioners appointed by the Meloni government, even before any judgement had been handed down, brought it to a standstill (Ilva has not produced cast iron since December, and the ore stopped arriving in August). The government could have issued a decree to override the Milan court order whilst awaiting the Court of Cassation’s ruling. But it is doing so only to extend the extraordinary redundancy scheme to all employees, blaming the Court of Appeal. The Court of Cassation has yet to rule, but Ilva has already shut down.