Berlusconi seeks immunity ahead of EU presidency

Italy's Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has decided to save himself from possible criminal conviction by introducing a law that will grant legal immunity to members of parliament.

The decision came after a dramatic court appearance in Milan on Monday by the billionaire media tycoon at the trial in which he is accused of bribing judges to swing a business deal. Without denying the charges, he told the court: "I am proud of my actions." On Tuesday, a group of four "wise men" in the ruling right-wing coalition proposed introducing immunity only for ministers and their deputies and secretaries, but yesterday a decision was taken to apply it to all sitting MPs.

The legal change would freeze Mr Berlusconi's numerous court actions as long as he remained an MP. It would also rescue the Prime Minister's close friend and colleague, Cesare Previti, sentenced to 11 years last week for bribing judges. Previti is a senator in Berlusconi's Forza Italia party.

Since Previti's conviction, and with Italy due to assume the EU's rotating presidency on 1 July, Mr Berlusconi's legal problems have become pressing. For a conviction and perhaps a prison sentence to be handed down while Italy was in charge of the EU would be, in the Italian phrase, a brutta figura, an ugly mess.

Italy's MPs were protected by an immunity law until 1993. It was swept away during the political meltdown that followed the Tangentopoli ("Bribesville") investigations that exposed immense and endemic bribery and corruption in Italy's ruling elite.

Yesterday Mr Berlusconi launched a publicity campaign in his own cause, depicting himself as the hapless victim of judicial wolves. He told state radio that prosecuting magistrates had raided his office 470 times in the past 10 years, launching 87 lawsuits against him and his business interests.

He said: "A certain part of the magistracy uses the powers conferred by law not to see that justice is done, but to attack and eliminate those whom they consider their political enemies." He claimed that, according to an opinion poll, "only 8 per cent [of the public] have faith in the judiciary". A new immunity law was not, he wrote in a letter to the Corriere della Sera newspaper, "to give the prime minister a helping hand in 'passing his exam' during the six-month presidency, which I am capable of managing by myself, but to restore to the whole of parliament its constitutional primacy and its real political centrality".

In court on Monday, he made no reference to the bribery charges against him, which relate to his attempted purchase of SME, a state food conglomerate. In yesterday's comments he also avoided any mention of the accusations. The problem was not his actions but a "politicised magistracy" bent on usurping power, he told the interviewer. "Those who were chosen by the citizens to govern must be able to do so without external intervention," he said.

Rushing in the new immunity law was "in the interests of the electors, not in my personal interest ... "

The executive council of the National Association of Magistrates reacted sharply. It said: "When the Prime Minister speaks of a criminal judiciary and continues to delegitimise the magistracy, our association has the right to express our lively alarm." The association said Mr Berlusconi's view of relations between state and judiciary was "a mutilation ... that has no precedent in the history of our country".