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Italy¡¯s discrimination against foreign lecturers defies law and justice

Would a seventh European Court ruling against Rome really force a change in attitude, asks David Petrie

November 8, 2021
Italian flag flying in front of European Union flag, to suggest how Italy¡¯s discrimination against foreign lecturers defies European law and justice
Source: Alamy

Poland across Europe recently when its top court denied that the law of the European Union took precedence over national law on constitutional matters.

The ruling was widely seen as a fundamental challenge to the legal structure on which the EU is based. In the European Parliament on 19 October, commission president Ursula von der Leyen expressed her displeasure at the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, for bringing the challenge ¨C to a constitutional tribunal dominated by his own appointees. Suddenly, the word ¡°Polexit¡± started being widely circulated.

This is only the latest incident in a long line of flashpoints between the commission and Poland. In April 2020, for instance, the commission sent a ¡°¡± to Poland, alleging that it had failed to fulfil its treaty obligations to ensure the right to an effective remedy before an independent and impartial court.

Hungary, of course, is in even more open conflict with the commission on issues such as its , and .

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But while Poland and Hungary have a growing history of defying European law, Italy has a much longer track record.

I will be in court in Verona on 25 November 2021, the latest of umpteen appearances. My first was shortly after my daughter was born. She is now 36, and I am 70. The issue in question has remained the same throughout those three and a half decades: fair and equal pay and pension rights for overseas academics.

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Non-discrimination on grounds of nationality was first enshrined in the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Yet scores of foreign lecturers in Italy are still seeking an ¡°effective remedy¡±. Many colleagues have died, with their court cases still pending; others are surviving on reduced pensions of €800 (?682) a month.

The European Commission sent Italy a letter of formal notice on 23 September and issued a press release stating: ¡°Italy is still discriminating against foreign lecturers.¡± If Italy does not address the matter by 23 November, the commission reserves the right to take Italy, once again, before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

The trouble is that the CJEU has already ruled six times on foreign lecturers in cases regarding Italy, in 1989, 1993, 1997, 2001, 2006 and 2008. And yet still the discrimination endures. The European Parliament Petitions Committee, in its , found ongoing ¡°blatant discrimination on grounds of nationality¡­with respect to security of tenure, career development, pensions and social security¡±.

In short, Italian universities, bankrolled by their paymasters in the Italian state, are undermining the rule of law and are frustrating the goals of EU integration in the single market.

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Particularly nefarious was the passing of the so-called Gelmini law, also in 2010, which provided for the ¡°extinguishing¡± of pending court cases by foreign academics. This was, in essence, racist legislation since it specifically targeted a category of non-Italian workers.

Although we welcome the commission¡¯s latest efforts to afford?us foreign academics equal status, we must nevertheless wonder why, if the Italian state can circumvent six CJEU judgments, it could not circumvent a seventh.

Two articles in the Treaty of Rome contain flaws that thwart citizens from obtaining an effective remedy.?Immigrant citizens may invoke Article 258 and complain to the commission that their EU rights are being infringed. The commission, using its wide discretionary powers, may or may not then contact the member state and may or may not bring it before the CJEU. Years of cat-and-mouse can ensue before the commission finally raises an action.

Most damningly of all, however, is the fact that complainants are extraneous to the entire legal proceedings. Neither they nor their lawyers have the right to be heard in the CJEU under this procedure. A member state may intervene (the UK did in the 2001 case), but not the injured party. This seems absurd. It is a basic principle of law that a person who believes they are being treated unfairly should have the right to have their complaint presented on their behalf in open court.

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Meanwhile, Article 267 of the treaty permits citizens to raise actions in national jurisdictions claiming discrimination based on nationality. If the domestic norms appear to be in conflict with EU norms, then judges may refer the case to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling. However, they are not bound to. Only the judges at the last tier of domestic courts ¡°against whose decisions there is no remedy under national law¡± are bound by the treaty to refer to the CJEU. But there is no guarantee that the judges will come to the conclusion that there is a conflict ¨C and no appeal procedure if they do not.

Hence the decades of frustration and underpayment endured by so many foreign academics in Italy. The open defiance of Poland¡¯s ruling Law and Justice party may well represent a threat to the entire EU¡¯s legal order. But no less so do the more insidious cankerworm tactics of the Italian state.

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David Petrie is chair of the Association of Foreign Lecturers in Italy (ALLSI).

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Reader's comments (3)

Excellent article, very clear and concise. Thank you, David Petrie. I would love to hear, from the horse's mouths, the real justification Italian politicians and academics have elaborated in their own minds, in these more than 25 years of blocking any improvement in the status of most of the foreign 'lettori', past and present, in Italian universities. Are the reasons financial? Bureaucratic? Psychological? Part of the national psyche? What?
David Petrie is right. Italy has been having its EU cake and eating it for decades. Long before Poland and Hungary replaced the now-departed UK as the EU¡¯s most obstreperous exponents of ¡®cakeism¡¯, Italy was quietly pursuing the convenient policy of cashing in Community funds but ignoring Treaty obligations that run counter to the interests of powerful domestic lobbies. One of these is its university system, which has systematically discriminated against the non-Italian academics who were recruited as lettori ¨C foreign language lecturers ¨C in the 1980s and early 1990s. Petrie gives the details on a national scale; I can only confirm on a personal level that it¡¯s a true story. I¡¯ve been a lettore at Milan State University since 1985. After 36 years of continuous employment, my current take-home pay is a little over 1300 euros a month. That¡¯s around half what I would be getting, if the University were obeying the law (not just ECJ rulings, but national Law No. 167/2017, which finally applied those rulings, albeit only on paper) and paying me at the salary level of a tenured researcher. Living and supporting a family in Milan on thirteen hundred euros a month is obviously not easy, so I do freelance work as well. I, too, have a daughter, but I do not receive the University¡¯s monthly allowance for dependent children ¨C because I earn income from freelance work alongside my (illegally low) salary! If that isn¡¯t Catch 22, I don¡¯t know what is. I¡¯m tired of this. So are many in Europe, not just in Poland and Hungary: tired of an EU that, as they perceive it, does nothing for them. Perhaps this time, at last, the Commission will bring Italy to book. If not, then history may well look back at the betrayal of the lettori ¨C surely the longest-running and most blatant case of discrimination by a member State against EU citizens ¨C as one of the keys to understanding how the whole European project unravelled.
Since EU funds for research flow to Italy, perhaps the institutions can be required to follow EU law in order to receive the funds they won?

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