Investigations are to be officially closed against 190 people for episodes on the street, while 50 are to stand trial for destruction and looting.
For once we're able to relay advance news on judicial proceedings relating to other demonstrators at the Genoa Group of Eight Summit, the prosecutors Canepa and Canciani and the Genoa Public Prosecutor's Office.

The Genoa Prosecutor's Office wanted to keep judicial proceedings against the 2001 demonstrators secret: public prosecutors Anna Canepa and Andrea Canciani have been ordered to focus solely on proceedings relating to the charges against demonstrators and have been freed from every other regular commitment. The results of this decision have quickly become clear: 190 investigations for street incidents and damage are nearly concluded and indictments will shortly be requested, while another 50 demonstrators are to be charged with destruction and looting.

This is all while charges of assault and violence on the part of state police, Carabinieri officers and their merry comrades lie moldering among piles of paperwork belonging to public prosecutors weighed down by other trials; while changes in the judges' panel and biblically slow technical and bureaucratic procedures in two other trials, Diaz and Bolzaneto, are slowing things down so much that the statute of limitations will probably expire in both - just as the police hoped for. Interestingly, some of the new cases involve people that have already brought charges of violence against police for exactly the same episode, creating an intimidatory atmosphere that should surely rouse some concern, even among the most self-satisfied "democratic" consciences.

In its "democratic" application of the law, the Genoese Public Prosecutor's Office has, over the course of the years, forged itself a frontline role with a doggedness that plays with political balances in the heart of the magistracy, with the lives of 25 people (now and who knows for how much longer) and with the history of a political process that culminated in the G8 Genoa summit - a history that should have been written by the thousands of individuals that marched rather than by court proceedings.

In over a year of hearings in the trial against 25 demonstrators there have been numerous opportunities for the Public Prosecutor's Office to open investigations aimed at ascertaining the truth - as is their purpose - of what happened in the streets of Genoa in 2001: the chain of state police and Carabinieri command, the charges on Via Tolemaide, the use of crossbars instead of batons and of gas prohibited under international conventions, the reticence and lies of several key witnesses and events in Piazza Alimonda which are emerging in all their murky complexity and which require the investigation to be reopened. But there is no hint of this in the Stakhanvist political manipulation of the judicial system by the Prosecutor's Office, which seems exclusively dedicated to doing its best to lend strength to ideas and theories that Genoa was one of many stages - but one of the most important - in a larger repressive movement.

It remains to be seen whether laziness will once more lead those bodies who should feel duty-bound to act - associations, movements and civilian groups - into pretending nothing is happening or whether this latest pressure will actually push some into action.