Italy Renders Woman and Child While Oiling Up to Kazakhstan

If staying indoors might be thought  to preclude being beaten bloody by state police for publicly questioning  EU and global policy, think again.  You can be sitting quietly in your villa in the Rome countryside when 50 armed state police arrive, and take you off forthwith to the nearest expulsion centre.  Whereupon both the Italian minister of the Interior and the Italian minister of Justice  declare all the rules to have been followed, all the papers are in order, and the jet that has just arrived at Ciampino from Kazakhstan can take you away in under 48 hours from your seizure.  Oh, yes, and remember to go back to the villa and get the six-year-old daughter for rendition to Kazakhstan too, otherwise her presence in Italy might disturb the rendition of the mother, they add thoughtfully.

And if you thought the 'pardon' granted by out-going president Napolitano (before he had fully organised his incoming once more) last February to a United States officer tried and condemned, confirmed through all appeals, to seven years for rendition of another unfortunate kidnapped in Milan and sent for torture in Egypt, was a constitutional stretch too far, now you know.  Rules are for wimps.  Women and little girls are for Kazakhstan and its mercies.

The United Kingdom granted political asylum to Mukhtar Ablyazov, whose wife and daughter have been rendered to Nazarbayev, in 2011 (not that the UK didn't fine him for various financial sins but they didn't and haven't handed him over).   There's the difference, you see. The United Kingdom has a default freedoms and rights history and culture, no matter how infuriated we get with lapses, collapses and downright failures in its implementation.  In Italy Berlusca goes for the weekend to visit Putin and jets are landing at Ciampino for little girls.