“Even if I was assisted by the unions, by a good lawyer, even if the small debate was cordial, the violence of a summons in which one’s work is examined starting from the arbitrariness of the authority and with respect to an arbitrary code of ethics does not Is it violence?”. It was written on his Facebook page Christian Raimo, teacher and writer, who in recent days was notified of a disciplinary measure for violation of the code of ethics for public employeesin particular for having criticized the Minister of Education and Merit Giuseppe Valditara on social media.
Professor Raimo was summoned to the headquarters of the Lazio regional school office directed by the director Anna Paola Sabatini. The conversation, in the presence of a lawyer who supported him, would have been calm: “it was an attentive and cordial meeting, the USR leaders asked and listened, I had produced a defense brief but in the end we let things be verbalized even simpler.”
In hindsight, however, the professor does not seem to have taken it well: “after leaving via Ribotta, the USR headquarters, throughout the day I thought about what kind of experience it had been. And I thought it had been a violent experience,” Raimo wrote today.
And then he explained the reasons for his regret. “Who decides what the decorum, the image, the reputation of a ministry is? Who decides what we can say during a TV show, in a newspaper, in a post, when teaching in public schools? Can we really be summoned before a regional school office and judged on this, risking a sanction?“, wrote the teacher.
“Is it a coincidence that Ilaria Salis, Seif Bensouibat, Donatella Di Cesare, the Righi teacher, teach in public and private schools and universities? It is a coincidence that they have doubled, according to what he said yesterday afternoon to the CGIL Tatarella (regional secretary of Knowledge workers ed.), disciplinary measures against teachers?”.
Then, Raimo goes on to explain the final concept: “Always in the same meeting Ascanio Celestini recalled how fascist dictatorships do not arrive with coups d’état. Of course there are South American cases, but the European experience is that of progressive consolidation of regimes, through one widespread forcing of democratic rulesa gradual proceduralization like a mithridatization, which is what yesterday made me think at a certain point, also, But who made me do it?“.
But how did it come to this? The media attention, including from the Ministry, towards Professor Raimo can be traced back first of all to the words spoken at the end of March by the same professor during a television debate on the case of Ilaria Salis: “An anti-fascist teacher goes to Hungary and beats up neo-Nazis. But why, what should be done to the neo-Nazis?”, the teacher had said, arousing quite a bit of criticism towards him.
As we have already had the opportunity to write, Raimo – which is also candidate in the European elections on the Alleanza Verdi Sinistra list and in recent days also involved in electoral stands – However, he specified that the dispute concerns not so much the “strong” words spoken on TV, but the content of a post published a few days later.
“It was a post – explains the teacher – in which I said that it seemed incredible to me that a self-styled liberal power reacted to criticism through legal means and above all said nothing about banners that neo-Nazis put up under a teacher’s school [me ne hanno messi tre, più quasi un migliaio di messaggi di minacce tra pubblici e privati]. That same power, it seems to me, is now still using the hierarchy to censor free expression.”
There would be two articles of Code of conduct for public employees to have been potentially violated by Raimo.
In article 10, in fact, it is written that “in private relationships, including extra-work relationships with public officials in the exercise of their duties, the employee does not exploit or mention the position he holds in the administration to obtain benefits that are not due to him and does not engage in any other behavior that could harm the ‘image of the administration’.
And article 11-ter of the same code explains that in “reference to the use of the media and social media” (…) “in any case the employee is required to refrain from any intervention or comment that could damage the prestige, decorum or image of the administration to which he belongs or public administration in general”.
It would also be articles on behavioral rules of state workers which according to the CGIL should not be adopted tout court for teachersfor whom there would be a right to free expression to be linked precisely to the particularity of the profession: for the union it would therefore be an improper adoption that is being implemented towards Raimo, which would also contain aspects of unconstitutionality.
Commenting “the acquittal of Donatella Di Cesare”, again Raimo argued that “a court has ruled that it is not a crime to say that a minister supports Hitlerian ideas if that minister says Hitlerian things, such as the idea of ethnic replacement”.
At this point, it will be up to the Lazio regional school office to establish whether or not the teacher has violated the teachers’ code of ethics: it is difficult to make predictions on how it will end.
However, it is good to remember that the charge notification delivered to the teacher so far does not represent, at the moment, a disciplinary procedure but only an invitation to justify a certain behavior considered hypothetically “out of line”. And this clarification was made on May 21st.
