For the first time in Italy a criminal trial for negligent environmental pollution towards the regional and municipal public administrators who had a responsibility for air quality. On Tuesday morning in Turin, there will be the first hearing of the “Smog” trial. Seven defendants, including former mayors Piero Fassino And Chiara Appendino and the former president of the Region Sergio Chiamparino. They will have to answer for the crime of negligent environmental pollution for the period 2015-2019. According to the accusation, they did not take effective measures to avoid the continuous exceeding of the concentration limits of pollutants in the air established by law, overruns which have led, according to the technical consultants of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, to over a thousand premature deaths and numerous hospital admissions. A pioneering process at Italian level. It had never happened before that representatives of a public body were brought to trial for this crime. In the past, other investigations in other cities had not passed the judge’s scrutiny.
It all started with a complaint presented seven years ago by the president of the Torino Respira committee Roberto Mezzalama: “I felt great personal frustration in seeing my children grow up in one of the most polluted cities in Europe,” Mezzalama, who for years has been involved in civic monitoring of pollution and raising awareness on the issues, tells ilfattoquotidiano.it on the phone. environment in schools. “It was a day in February, I was cycling in the midst of smog, the air was so polluted that you could cut it with a knife and so I decided to involve my lawyer friends and after rather in-depth technical and legal work we decided to file the ‘exposed’.
The central theme is that “reports by ARPA epidemiologists were published on the Municipality and Region websites which clearly spoke of many hundreds dead due to smog every year. So it was evident that the administrators were perfectly aware of the situation, but were not at all making the decisions necessary to resolve the problem, on the contrary.” Thus the idea of presenting the complaint was born. “Also because if politics alone does not address these issues, the discussion must be brought to another level, the legal one”. And as often happens in other fields, “unfortunately, citizens and the judiciary come before politics”.
The Torino Respira committee gave its contribution to the development of the investigations – closed just under a year ago – with several in-depth reports on the risks of smog. “The effects of pollution manifest themselves in both the short and long term – he recalls Simona Ferrerodoctor in Internal Medicine atMolinette Hospital and member of the Torino Respira committee – there are damages to children such as the increase in lower respiratory tract infections, the increase in asthma exacerbations and there would seem to be a probable association with a delay in neurocognitive development. And on the other hand there would also be a probable association with the development of neurocognitive diseases such as Alzheimer’s.” And so on Tuesday morning a historic trial will open for the world of Italian environmentalism. And the Torino Respira committee will ask to be formed civil party to bring their scientific contribution to the trial as well.
“If the Court of Turin decides to continue the trial, in the subsequent hearings a very important confrontation will open between the prosecution and the defence” adds the Committee’s lawyer Marino Careglio. A process that will also be useful 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 air quality and health of citizens”. All this will be discussed during the next hearings while outside the courtrooms the Torino Respira Committee will continue to carry out its civic air monitoring campaigns through the deployment of samplers and bottom-up data analysis. “The next action will start on June 26 – concludes Mezzalama – to remember that smog kills even in summer”. The objective is to collect data on ozone, a pollutant which is present mainly in summer and is growing, also due to global warming.
