Riccardo Fercia isn't giving up. The lawyer, a member of the Regional Electoral Guarantee Board that voted to impeach Alessandra Todde, filed a new defense brief this morning with the Cagliari Court of Appeal registry .
The Constitutional Court's ruling did not put a final nail in the coffin of Alessandra Todde's disqualification, the jurist emphasizes, but established that it is up to the Civil Court to decide . The injunction order from the Electoral Guarantee Board was essentially annulled "partially," and only insofar as it (erroneously) held that the "serious violations" found (as the Court defined them) were attributable to paragraph 7 of Article 15 of Law 515 of 1993, which provides for disqualification.
A ruling that "substantially coincides", in Fercia's opinion, with the decision of the Court of Cagliari which, excluding the applicability of paragraph 7, requalified the historical fact "exactly as contested by the Guarantee Board", however relating it to paragraph 8 of the same article 15 , which equates the filing of documents that make it impossible to control the candidate's individual electoral expenses with a failure to deposit in a material sense and also provides for the possibility of forfeiture.
In essence, the Court "not only declared the Region's appeal inadmissible", but also highlighted that it is up to the ordinary judge to decide on the contested facts .
The civil court will therefore determine the classification of the "serious" violations found within the two legal hypotheses for forfeiture, "provided for not by paragraph 7 but by paragraphs 8 and 9 of Article 15 of the law." And it will decide on forfeiture, binding the Regional Council "to fulfill its official duties."
Last May , Riccardo Fercia's mandate to represent the Electoral Guarantee Board was revoked . But he is not giving up and is continuing the fight: both to defend the measure he had voted for as a member of the Guarantee Board, and because, as he writes in the statement released today, "the revocation of his defense mandate will not take effect until the lawyer is replaced," which did not happen because by revoking Fercia's mandate without appointing another, the Board had essentially renounced its right to defend him.
(Unioneonline)
