From now on, attack a referee during sports events will be like attacking an officer or judicial police or public security agent in the act or in fulfillment of the functions or how to attack members of health personnel in the hospital, to which these same rules apply (article 583 quater criminal code).
It means two to five years for personal injuries which, in case of serious or very serious injuries, become from four to ten respectively and from eight to sixteen years. The Italian Referees Association greets what he calls “Civilization rule”.
The problem of referees’ security, in fact, is and is warned, especially in the minor and youth championships, in which there are no cameras, while the referees themselves, exhibited, are often teenagers, young as the players, most of the time intimidated by adults, often parents of the players. It remains to be understood if the remedy will have real effects as well as symbolic. Someone titled: “Attacking the referees will be a crime”. A blurred: it is not that so far the attacks on the referees were admitted, the rules that protect all the people were valid for the referees, now instead the race judges are equated to some particular figures such as doctors and the police, so the penalties are more serious.
The new provision is in line with the government’s tendency to respond to any type of problem by aggravating the penalties of the criminal code, counting on a deterrent automatism which, however, is all to be demonstrated (If it were so automatic to abstain from crimes for fear of very serious penalties, the death penalty alone should break down the murder rate and instead it is not so simple, as the United States show, the most violent among the western countries despite the capital penalty in force).
Waiting to understand if the referee decree will have the desired effects, It will be up to the contradictions of this way of making laws: years of prison that for some time have increased for the most varied conduct (not all as serious as the attacks on people) while prisons already burst. Meanwhile, the rules that continually change risk slowing down the response of justice already in trouble.
And someone might wonder: The fact that the modification of article 583 quater of the criminal code, designed at the beginning for others, extended from 2023 to healthcare personnel and now also to sports referees, is not also not valid for the school staff, who will have to wait for the procedure of the bill ” Provisions regarding the protection of teaching staff of the school and school managers ” Now in the commission, to see the attacks on teachers sanctioned with the same gravity?
These are the risks of the strabism of doing laws looking at the system with small pieces: Equal parts between unequal and vice versa, with the risk of producing some de facto injustice.
And if, then, it was true that it is educated with the example more than with the threat, what effect it will do to those who have to learn respect for the referees to hear the Trump on duty insolent judges and supreme court (which are the arbitrators of the state) whenever they do not give him reasonfor other sports sports for many latitudes and longitudes including ours?
It will then be necessary – if only because the penalties come later and instead it is necessary to prevent – do not neglect the good intentions of Antonio Zappi, president of the Italian Referees Association: “Together with the repressive measures, the violence will still have to be fought also with cultural measures and training projects that, Together with all the federal components that care about the protection of our children and also with the new anti -violence observatory of the FIGC, the Hague will surely put on the pitch ».
However, those also risk being vanified by bad examples.
