Obituaries
'IN MEMORY'
Giuliano Vassalli, partisan of freedom and progress
LUIS ARROYO SHOE 21/11/2009
We can well imagine the atmosphere with the memory of the emotion of seeing Rome “cittá
open ”by Roberto Rossellini, in the art house cinemas of our first
seventy, between the scenic tension and the cries against the dictatorship. maybe for the
young people of today suffice to see Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. And it is that Giuliano
Vassalli (1915-2009), son of the professor of Civil Law at La Sapienza who
completes his studies in 1936 and prepares his doctorate together with the legal genius of the
fascism Arturo Rocco, joins the partisan resistance in the early autumn of
1943. In January of the following year, takes advantage of his Germanic training and his good bearing and
dressed in a German uniform and, with his pistol at his belt and the complicity of the doctor
from Regina Coeli prison, He hits the hand and gets the escape of two young men
that no one knew then, but then they gave a lot to talk about: Sandro Pertini y
Giuseppe Saragat.
The spectacular success of the action pays for it three months later, when caught by
the gestapo, subjected to heinous torture and marked for execution at the scene of the
butchery that will be known by the name of "las fossas ardeatinas". But one
Truly miraculous intervention of Pius XII achieves his release shortly
before the crime against humanity committed by Priebke and others is consummated
a few hours after the US forces entered Rome in July.
After the war, their academic and civic life is incorporated into the everyday landscape of the
Italian Republic. as criminal, his work exceeds the limits of five volumes
with the more than 4.000 pages of his Complete Works that Editorial Giuffré published in
1997, which begins with a lucid chronicle of the Nuremberg trial.
After Compline he still presented us with a volume on Criminal Law
International and another on overcoming the past in Germany 1945 and, behind the
reunification of 1990, about the trials of those who shot to kill on the wall of
berlin, under the title of The Radbruch Formula. Days before he died 21 October,
to the 94 years-, he sent his latest work on fundamental rights to his friends
of the defendant in terrorism trials.
He always exercised his civic responsibilities in the ranks of Italian socialism:
councilor, deputy, senator, Minister of Justice three times, magistrate of
Constitutional Court and president of the same. His intelligence, his honesty and his
ability to reach agreements made it possible for him to complete a profound reform of the
Italian criminal proceedings and not a small one in civil matters.
Since Nuremberg he has represented Italian legal science in scientific societies
international. It is incorporated into 1946 to the UN Penal and Penitentiary Committee; on
1949 founded, together with Filippo Gramatica and Marc Ancel, the International Society of
Social Defense and participates in the direction of the International Law Association
Penal, true mother of the current International Criminal Court. Medalla Beccaria 2005,
honoris causa from the University of Bologna in 2002 and by the University of Castilla-
La Mancha in the same year. For this reason he visited us for the last time, completing
with Seville his knowledge of Spain, from the Barcelona that he appreciated so much and
passing through the two Castillas and Extremadura. Of our country he said he continued
being a distant and lost dream to which he also felt linked by blood
spilled by his uncle Mario in the Civil War and by his friendship with Mariano Ruiz
Funes, Luis Jimenez de Asua and Manuel Lopez Rey, and the most modern Marine
barber saints, Agustín Fernández Albor and Fernando Ledesma. The two former ministers
of Justice inaugurated the Melchor de Macanaz Building of the Law School of
Albacete in 1988. May the earth be light!
Luis Arroyo Zapatero is president of the Société Internationale de Fénse Sociale.
Giuliano Vassalli.-
No comment yet, add your voice below!