Quote:
Originally Posted by jalfrezi
That's not what the attacks on "leftist lawyers" is about, which is the far right pushing to get European countries to withdraw from long-standing Human Rights legislation because those wretched "leftist lawyers" insist on defending people's rights to asylum and "leftist judges" apply existing legislation correctly.
If it wasn't for all these pesky establishment "leftists" we could just ignore all the laws we don't like.
No.
I already mentioned why i used the expression leftist judges to refer to italian supreme court decisions.
The italian constitution is full of positive rights unlike liberal anglo constitutions. Positive rights aren't , unlike normal constitutional rights, a list of things the government can't do to you no matter what. They are rather a list of things you are owed from other people resources, with the state seen as the agent that has to fulfill that obligation.
Now who does those positive rights apply to? the constitution is very clear and uses the word "citizen" (cittadino) many many times when listing those positive rights. In some cases instead it uses individual or person.
First example (i use the official english translation)
Article 3
All
citizens shall have equal social dignity and
shall be equal before the law, without distinction
of gender, race, language, religion, political
opinion, personal and social conditions.
It shall be the duty of the Republic to remove
those obstacles of an economic or social nature
which constrain the freedom and
equality of
citizens, thereby impeding the full development of
the human person and the effective participation
of all workers in the political, economic and social
organisation of the country
This is a very clear, positive right to redistributive welfare correct? and very clearly strictly limited to citizens. So people physically in Italy who aren't citizens don't have any constitutional right to any form of welfare, under any reasonable reading of the constitution. It's transparent, it's only for citizens. Then there is the bizzarre marxist right to "workers" but let's not discuss this now.
Normal law can obviously decide to cover non citizens as well, no doubt. But if parliament changes those laws, the removal of welfare for non citizens cannot be considered unconstitutional under article 3.
(the word citizen got expanded to citizen of any european union nation because of a treaty, but that's covered constitutionally so that's correct)
So what happened? ultra-radical maniacal leftist judges decided that the word citizen means immigrant non citizens as well. A judicial coup d'etat (on that topic), they completly warped the very transparent text.
So when local governments tried to only give public housing and/or help for rent to actual italian (or EU) citizens in poor conditions, to fulfill their constitutional duties, the court said no , you have to give them to immigrants as well. And given immigrants are poorer and with more children, nowadays almost all public/subsidized housing in the center-north is occupied my immigrants.
Public housing to non citizen immigrants is just an example but there are many others welfare related.
I don't know why you think in this case (and in all other welfare related cases) "leftist judges just applied the law correctly".