Tomorrow it will be held in Turin the first hearing of the so-called “Process Smog“. The municipal and regional public administrators, who were responsible for protecting the city’s air quality between 2015 and 2019, were sued for the crime of negligent environmental pollution. The defendants are accused of not having adopted effective measures to avoid the constant exceeding of the concentration limits of pollutants in the air, as established by law. “This is the first criminal trial of this kind in Italy, in which the administrators of local public bodies are accused of the crime of negligent environmental pollution, which the legislator introduced in 2015 for more effective environmental protection,” underlines the Torino Respira Committee which will ask to join as a civil party tomorrow.
“The complaint that started the investigations which then led to the indictment of the Turin administrators was presented more than seven years ago – he claims Roberto Mezzalamapresident of the Torino Respira Committee – and the thing that surprised me the most when I started looking for data for the complaint was that reports by ARPA epidemiologists were published on the Municipality and Region’s websites which clearly spoke of many hundreds of deaths due to smog every year. So it was clear that the administrators were perfectly aware of the situation, but were not at all making the decisions necessary to solve the problem”.
“If the Court of Turin decides to continue the trial, in the subsequent hearings there will be a very important discussion between the prosecution and the defence, with contributions from authoritative experts on both sides, to understand the reasons for the serious state of air pollution in Turin, the damage to health caused by smog and also the possible responsibilities of those who had the task of protecting the quality of the air and the health of citizens – highlights Marine Caregliolawyer of the Torino Respira Committee – this in-depth analysis could also represent an important element of reflection for current and future public administrators”.
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