Cesare Battisti (born 1954) - Battisti's Return To France

Battisti's Return To France

Ten years earlier, in 1985, the President of France François Mitterrand had indicated that "leftist Italian activists who were not indicted for violent crimes and had given up terrorist activity would not be extradited to Italy"; this became known as the "Mitterrand doctrine". Many Italian political activists had fled to France during the 1970s-1980s. Trusting in this declaration, Battisti returned to France in 1990, where he was arrested on Italy's request in 1991, when his sentence was confirmed in the Court of Cassation. He thus passed five months in Fresnes prison, and then was freed after the extradition request was rejected by the Paris Appeal Court on May 29, 1991. French justice concluded that the anti-terrorist legislation enacted in Italy "went against the French principles of law," which, along with the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), prohibited in particular to extradite a person sentenced in absentia if that person had not been in a condition to adequately defend himself during his trial. The court also defined the evidences held against Battisti as "contradictory" and "worthy of a military justice."

After his release in 1991, Battisti lived in Paris, where he wrote his first novel, Les Habits d'ombre ("Shadow clothes"). Two thrillers, L'Ombre rouge ("Red shadow") and Buena onda, took as backdrop the Parisian world of Italian fugitives from justice. Another major novel, titled Dernières cartouches ("Last bullets"), takes place in Italy during the "years of lead".

In 1997, jointly with other left-wing Italians who had fled to France and were accused of taking part in violent crimes, he asked without success the President of Italy at the time, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro (DC) for an amnesty.