The class action is the ability for a group of citizens to sue a company or a public office when they feel they have suffered damages because of a certain behavior. Italy is virtually the only civilized country that has never introduced this possibility, probably because it's an exaggeration to say that ours is a civilized country. The previous center-left government was to introduce the law, but then didn't.
The current government has provided two very different class action, one against public administration and one against private companies. The first has just been announced by Minister Brunetta and will enter into force very slowly, between January and October 2010 depending on the public sector. It provides in practice that citizens can at first send a warning and then a civil action against a public office or a public company to restore the proper conduct of a function or to ask to provide a service. But the new law doesn't provide for damages of any kind. Therefore serve only for less serious cases, a group of citizens can use to get a missing service, but cannot obtain compensation for damages caused by the lack of that service. Which instead is included in all normal countries to avoid government inefficiency. You cannot even define that a true class action, is a name that was given to it only for advertising, really it's only a claim for service disruptions.
As for the true class action against private companies, this should come into force in 2010, but has already been postponed several times and will not be retroactive, so no one can claim damages for the many abuses which occurred in our country over the past 50 years. It will never be a class action for defrauded investors in Parmalat's collapse and many other serious cases of financial fraud that in Italy always go unpunished. Moreover, the class action is only permitted for users or consumers and not for common people: this means that if a polluting company kills people that aren't its workers or clients, there is no hope of obtaining justice. The trial against Eternit asbestos factory started only thanks to the prosecutor office of Turin, while in many other very serious cases of pollution such as the Ilva of Taranto, the deaths of the workers are the subject of a lawsuit, but not those of the citizens, yet tumors in the city have doubled because of dioxin.
But to hope that the corrupted Italian political class would make a decent law for class action is pure folly. The only hope is that eventually the process of EU integration will force also our unfortunate country to approach the standards of other democracies and to respect the most elementary rules of justice.
Francesco Defferrari
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