ROME – Italy’s judges vowed not to be intimidated and rallied to support Milan colleagues investigating the sex scandal surrounding Silvio Berlusconi on Saturday as the prime minister rounded on the magistrates. The billionaire media magnate has denounced the probe into his sex life as a politically motivated attack and warned last week the judges’ behaviour could not go “without adequate punishment.”
“The judges will continue to carry out their duties without being intimidated,” Italy’s National Association of Magistrates (ANM) said in an official statement at a ceremony marking the new judicial year in Milan. Luca Palamara, head of the ANM, said he held Milan prosecutors investigating 74-year-old Berlusconi over allegations that he had sex with minors in great esteem, and fiercely criticised the “unprecedented aggression” against them.
“Insults, offences, vilification campaigns against individual judges, threats of punishment” against magistrates whose only crimes lie in insisting the law be the same for all citizens, are “against justice,” the ANM said. On Friday, as the Superior Council of Magistrates (CSM) spoke out in their colleagues’ defence, Berlusconi condemned magistrates as “a privileged caste” who abuse their power “to the harm of other citizens without ever having to account for themselves.”
