There Court of Cassation has the verdict of the Court of Appeal of Palermo which had acquitted the defendants was annulledconvicted at first instance, for the death of 39 workers occurred due to breathing in asbestos fibers during their work at the Fincantieri plant in Palermo.
Now a new appeal process will have to take place which will have to take note of the principles established by the Supreme Court. The decision came yesterday evening. The defendants, Giuseppe Cortesi and Antonio Cipponeri, were acquitted by the second section of the Court of Appeal of Palermo after their conviction at first instance.
Initially these were two separate trials, later consolidated on appeal. The accusation: having caused the death of 39 workers and serious injuries to 11 others, having not adopted any form of protection to prevent its employees from inhaling asbestos dust, an extremely dangerous material for human health, used in Palermo in naval repair and transformation works.
The second section of the Court of Appeal overturned the first instance convictions of both defendants, deeming the exposure to asbestos at the Fincantieri factory in Palermo to have ceased at the beginning of the 1980s.
The Court of Cassation, however, considered the decision of the Court of Appeal of Palermo to be incorrect, annulling the acquittal with postponement.
“Justice has been served this time too – says the secretary of Fiom CGIL Palermo and Sicily Francesco Foti – Unfortunately, the workers will never come back to life but today all these deaths and also the union, which has always been on the front line in this tough battle, have been proven right.” And the lawyer Fabio Lanfranca, who assisted Fiom and many of the victims’ families in the trial, adds: “The workers at the Palermo construction site died not due to an unforeseeable accident but because they were forced for decades by their employer to work daily with asbestos without any protection and without having received any information on the dangers of the material supplied to them and which slowly killed them”
