In this umpteenth hearing in videoconference and after many requests, all denied, to appear and attend in person and not in absence to all the hearings of the trial that sees me charged, for the heavy and infamous accusation of massacre, I have to face the issue of videoconferencing, which enters, or to be more precise, was entering, in the infamous logic of the differentiation of the penitentiary circuits, in which the individual prisoner and accused is demonized and dehumanized by the said “considerable social dangerousness”. And I said that I was entering, because the videoconference, the trial in absentia, has been extended to all the prisoners in Italian prisons, who have been left without a real defense and with the marginalization that all this implies for all the defendants who suffer this imposition, through a liberticidal dynamic of the umpteenth emergency, this time for the Covid-19 emergency, which then became law. It is known, it is already evident and unmasked – and I am not only talking about the contradiction of this problem especially, or of one law or another – how the specific problem of the videoconference has reduced the defense to be a farce, annulling in fact the defendant within the trial.

This court will probably say that this has nothing to do with the trial taking place today.

But I believe it does, and what is more, I believe it is a fundamental issue. I am talking about the contradiction that the States possess by their own systemic nature, the fundamental problem is the disintegration and degeneration that dresses itself as emergentialism, and has the objective of breaking and directing the consolidated and ordinary legality at will, transforming it into another legality. We see it with the same dynamics of the perpetual emergency, and the specific plan of the videoconference is only an example of how the systemic authoritarianism liberticidal system expands in a capillary way. It is the exception, the emergency of today, that forges the law of tomorrow, reducing it more and more. The trials by videoconference, that is, in absentia, have been established by the continuous emergencies within the said social dangerousness, which is already the norm, such as the trial by videoconference for all the prisoners in Italian prisons. And it is not that this does not have repercussions on the real conditions of the entire trial, since it hinders the management of a real defense of the accused, creating a contradiction with what your own democratic and bourgeois law argues.
Continue reading Italy: Statement of Juan Sorroche in front of the court of Treviso and against the telematization of the democratic inquisition. →