Anarchists: Delmastro's conviction for disclosure of official secrets upheld on appeal

The Court of Appeal of Rome confirmedafter two hours of council chamber, theconviction against the former undersecretary of Justice Andrea Delmastro, on the charge of revealing office secrets, in relation to the case of anarchist Alfredo Cospito. In the last hearing, the deputy public prosecutor had called for an acquittal with the formula 'the fact does not constitute a crime'. In first instance, on 20 February a year ago, Delmastro, who was present in court today, had been sentenced to eight months, suspended sentence. The judges at first instance had recognised general extenuating circumstances for Delmastro, who resigned as undersecretary of justice on 24 March, and applied a one-year ban on public office, rejecting the requests for compensation made by the civil parties, four members of the Democratic Party parliament. A verdict confirmed by the Capital Territorial Court 'I am certainly ready to appeal in Cassation'. This was the lapidary reaction of former undersecretary Andrea Delmastro Delle Vedove, on the sidelines of the reading of the sentence, before leaving the courtroom.

The basis of the conviction was the disclosure of confidential information. News, communicated to Mr Donzelli, which the Court of First Instance had considered covered by official secrecy, the dissemination of which is criminally punishable (by Article 326 of the Criminal Code). For the first instance judges, the disclosure posed a concrete danger to the protection and effectiveness of crime prevention and repression. For the court, Delmastro could not have been 'consideredso light and superficial, as the Defence and Prosecution would have it, as not to have considered and failed to realise the value and delicacy, and ultimately the secrecy, of that information'.

The Court of Rome had reaffirmed the secrecy of information "The rule," wrote the Capitoline judges, "encompasses a much broader scope than the administrative classifications often referred to; the categories of 'secret/secret, confidential/confidential' and other similar categories are certainly included within the scope of the protection of the rule but do not at all exhaust its scope, so that it is completely misleading and devoid of any legal basis to opine that since none of these clauses was affixed to the report on the correspondence, only for this reason the information contained therein was ostensible urbi et orbi". Theseare the reasons of the first instance, pending the Court of Appeal.

Andrea Delmastro's defender, lawyer Andrea Milani, is disappointed and astonished by the appeal judges' decision: 'This is a case for which I am prepared to go all the way. We are waiting for the motivations of the sentence. We will definitely go to the Court of Cassation. We are disappointed and astonished by the verdict this afternoon. In light of the words of the Prosecutor General's Office and the reconstruction, there was no doubt. The alleged information revealed was not secret'.