So presumably Mignini and his lawyers will have the ability to ask senior powers to investigate this alleged persecution?
There will be a response. It is not possile to predict to what extent and what levels this will involve.
And you will be able to write internet commentary about those alleged to have committed the persecution?
I'm not planning to do anything like that for the years to come.
By now, two elements have already been hit, the former head of the Florence prosecution office, Nannucci, has gone, the office was in fact decapitated. Maradei, the judge who convicted Mignini, has also fallen in disgrace.
And the senior powers will conduct a thorough and competent investigation into the matter, and identify if in fact there was a persecution against Mignini?
No, this won't happen in the most official form, unless there is a parliamentary initiative, or an investigation by another prosecution office and decisions by other courts.
It is difficult to talk in terms of "senior powers" because there is no organ with a power directly senior to a judiciary office. There are higher courts, but they decide on decisions, not on members of the judiciary.
There is no senior power specifically in charge of finding out whether magistrates commited things. Magistrates are subject to ordinary courts like all citizens. Impossible to predict what courts will find out about somebody.
And if any evidence of persecution is discovered in such an investigation, the perpetrators will be held accountable appropriately?
The point is actually not about persecution. I won't call it a persecution, I would call it abuse of power.
The former chief prosecutor of Florence, Nannucci, was wiretapped as he gave defensive suggestions to a suspect (Spezi) in order to escape the investigation by his same office. You don't need to know much more than things like that. That person is no longer in that place of power. Other structures andnetworks still exists.
Conversely, if there's never an investigation into suspected persecution, are we to conclude either that a) corruption reaches the very top of the Italian judicial system, and that the persecutors are being protected by their superiors, or b) that no persecution ever took place?
First, you must not commit the mistake of considering Italy as a country with institutions in a "state of peace". There is an underlying civil war and if you see "corruption" like an illness, you must see it in terms of fight, not in terms of existence. The question is not who and what exists, but who and what fights what.
There is actually no "top" of the Italian judiciary, because magistrates are not in a hiearchy. There are higher and lower organs, like high and lower courts, but there is no power that has a mandate to determine that criminal actions are comitted within the structure.
There is a Supreme Council of Magistrates (CSM), which may carry on disciplinary actions, like the one they pusue about Manuela Comodi, but these are reserved activities not public trials, and they cannot replace findings for which criminal courts would be competent. Because if we are talking a about "persecution" of Mignini, we are talking about criminal activities of mafious and subversive kind, not something that can be dealt with by the CSM.
Does corruption reach the "very top" of Italian institutions? Impossible to tell (and the question actually makes little sense). It is actually highly improbable that - in this moment - the person at the highest seats of, let's say, the CSM or the Supreme Court, are corrupt. However, I can guess that a percentage of Italian magistrates in the general level are 'corrupt' (not honest), I have no idea how many but if someone said ten percent I would take this figure as realistic. These people are statystically distributed in the whole body, and they tend to be actually known by the public opinion as being corrupt.
But the existence of non-official structures of power of a criminal and subversive kind is inherent to the Italian society. It is not the judiciary which is corrupted, it is rather that part of the Italian society actually consists of networks that we may define mafious and subversive. These networks have their "men" in the judiciary as in any other institution. But they are a minority, and they manage to control the judiciary far less than other institutions. Corruption anyway depends on the person, not on the institution he is a part of.
As a whole, I regard the judicial body in its highest institutions (and specifically the people involved in this case such sa the Supreme Court offices dealing with this case) as non-corrupt. I don't know if it will have the resources and strenght to actually "eliminate" (eradicate) the criminal structures, to the point of fully reveal all plots and persecutions, it is improbable that this takes place entirely and within a short term.
