Continue working, looking for other paths because it is useless to insist on following those that end up against the wall of Hungarian justice. And changing institutional interlocutors because the government's line, and in particular that of the Minister of Justice Carlo Nordio, turned out to be "a hole in the water": Roberto Salis has no intention of stopping fighting for his daughter Ilaria and, after the yesterday's disappointment, he wrote to the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella asking for his intervention.
Already on 17 January he had sent a certified email to the Quirinale and immediately received a reply from the president who "in my experience has proven to be the only one who responds with a sense of urgency to the problems of an Italian citizen". He wrote him again "a very dry letter" in the hope that "it will move the Italian government, because evidently it did not do what it had to do", still quoting Article 3 of the Constitution "because he is the guarantor of the fact that all citizens they are equal before the law and now the different sentences for my daughter and for Gabriele Marchesi have shown that two Italian citizens are getting two different treatments."
If the Budapest court has in fact decided that Ilaria Salis must continue to remain in prison, where she has now been for over 13 months, without being able to serve the precautionary measure of house arrest even in Hungary, the Milan Court of Appeal has decided not only not to extradite Marchesi, but also to cancel the European arrest warrant requested by Hungary, releasing the 23-year-old co-accused for the same crimes as Salis. A decision which in fact complicates the judicial process of the Milanese activist, raising the level of conflict between the courts of the two countries which mutually deny the extradition of the two defendants in the same trial.
Video Budapest, house arrest denied: Ilaria Salis remains in cell
Roberto Salis knows this well, as he communicated the outcome of the Milan trial to his daughter: "Although obviously the decision taken does not favor her, she was extremely happy and satisfied because justice has been done for Gabriele. And when a person has a character like hers, you really feel like you have to fight for her." He will therefore continue to fight, not so much with an appeal against yesterday's decision "about which I have no great illusions", but rather by involving the Head of State "so that he can intervene on Orban" and no longer the government: "He didn't call me no minister. When someone who holds important positions tells you 'do A, B and C in this way' and then all this turns out to be a failure, a phone call to show closeness would have seemed the minimum to me", he explains with clear reference to Minister Nordio who had pushed for house arrest to be requested in Hungary.
Instead, the lawyer Eugenio Losco, who defends both Ilaria Salis and Gabriele Marchesi, attacks Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani: "He had expressly asked the Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjartó that Ilaria should no longer be handcuffed and chained, leaving him a written note which I have read and this was not achieved either and therefore it is evident that Hungary gave Italy a slap in the face yesterday." "There is no hope for the appeal to the Budapest court", continues the lawyer Losco, there must instead be more incisiveness in the political and diplomatic action of the Italian government: "Meloni should intervene directly with Orban, she cannot can no longer pretend nothing happened." An appeal which, in any case, can be presented after Easter, explained Hungarian lawyer Gyorgy Magyar, without making any assumptions regarding the timing of the appeal.
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