March 2024, Year XVI, n. 3
Vitalba Azzollini
Citizens not Subjects
“We citizens shouldn’t be the subjects of some public power. And the only way for us not to be is if we can verify its actions, know what is motivating its choices and judge their validity.”
Telos: Long-time champion of administrative transparency, you continue to fight for citizens to be informed of the mechanisms and motivations behind public decision-making. Why?
Vitalba Azzollini: Because we citizens should not be the subjects of some public power. And the only way for us not to be is if we can verify its actions, know what is motivating its choices and judge their validity. Subjects is the word used in the title of a book from 2019 which I co-authored for the Bruno Leoni Institute: The State and Us: Are we still subjects?
Administrative transparency - an expression from the Einaudian principle ‘to know in order to deliberate’- is a tool whereby anybody can gain knowledge of ‘res publica’, hence of everything that more or less directly impacts their lives. So, transparency is knowledge, and knowledge is necessary in any human context, even in that of law.
Speaking of law, the principle of transparency might not be present in the Constitution, but it is grounded in it. Transparency is related to the impartiality of the public administration (Article 97). Impartiality means no discrimination and no favouritism, two ills transparency can prevent. Unsurprisingly, Louis Brandeis, an American lawyer and jurist, said “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
Transparency as a discipline has evolved over the past decades. In 1990, the law on administrative procedure excluded any sort of “generalised control of the activities of the public administrations.” And in 2016 - long after many other countries - Italy had its own FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, which aims to “foster widespread forms of control over the pursuit of institutional functions and the use of public resources.”
The FOIA gives any citizen the right to ask administrations for data and documents for any purpose and without needing a motive. However, Filippo Turati’s 1908 aspiration that “the house of the administration must be made of glass” is still light years away. The limits the administrations often set for citizens’ transparency requests represent a sort of rubber wall. So, we are still subjects, no question.
Almost ten years ago you wrote: “The growing demand for legality actually exists alongside the perception that in many cases respecting the law is an obstacle for citizens’ and companies’ activities. Changing regulations that are incoherent and difficult to understand as well as a financial burden for those they are meant for do not restrict the discretionary power of the public administration within clearly defined criteria, but they do seem to encourage behaviour aimed at trying to avoid the costs, sluggishness and inefficiency that hinder private economic initiative.” Has anything changed since then?
Governments change, but not the bad habit of generating an overabundance of fickle, confusing regulations that become stratified over time without any sort of ‘upkeep’. These regulations are a cost for citizens and companies, which have to find them, interpret them and adapt to them. And this cost is added to the fiscal and administrative costs the regulations themselves already impose. The Country remains ensnared in restrictions, and the more there are, the greater the tendency to grease certain procedural bottlenecks using rather uncommendable practices. After all, as Tacitus said “the more laws there are, the more corrupt a government is”, and this is always true.
The streamlining of regulatory bureaucracy we so desire is necessary to foster productivity, investment and innovation, and therefore to support competitiveness and growth. To do this, all we would need to do is use the tools we already have, from tools to measure and reduce administrative costs, to analysing and verifying regulatory impact, to estimating ex ante and ex post its effects, also in terms of costs, in order to come up with better quality regulations.
Why did the Data Protection Authority temporarily block ChatGPT last year? And what did it accuse Open AI of?
Here the problem of transparency comes up again, and it clearly applies to more than just the public powers. According to the Authority, one thing OpenAI did was it failed to disclose how and why it was processing data using ChatGPT.
The Authority said that what it lacked was a system to guarantee transparency, to ensure user consent was being provided in a truly conscious way. The Authority also claimed it lacked the appropriate legal basis, i.e. the thing that makes it legal to gather and process personal data to train the algorithms used to run ChatGPT.
Another of the Authority’s accusations regarded inaccurate data processing, or rather, search results that “do not always correspond to real data”. As we know, after being temporarily blocked, the platform was up and running again. However, on 29 January the Authority announced it had notified OpenAI of a penalty for violating the personal data protection law.
Another hotly debated topic in Italy was lab-grown meat, or synthetic meat. Could you explain what is going on there exactly?
First of all, one clarification: it is not synthetic meat, because there is nothing synthetic about it. It is lab-grown meat, meaning that cells are taken from animals and grown in a lab. The law prohibiting this is not only pointless, it is harmful. It is pointless, firstly, because it prohibits something that is already prohibited because it has yet to be authorised.
Lab-grown meat has never been approved by the EU, nor has it been tested by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) according to the European regulation on novel food. The law is also pointless because, even though it is in force, it is not applicable because it was adopted in violation of the European TRIS procedure.
The government should have sent the draft bill to the European Commission for it to assess whether the law posed an obstacle to free movement in the single market and not approve it for at least three months. Instead, Italy violated the standstill period, rendering the law inapplicable.
This law is even harmful. It will dissuade investors from financing research in Italy related to a food which the Government has placed a ban on, even though it is currently inapplicable, and it will cause companies and professionals in this sector to move abroad.
And since, based on the EU regulations on free movement, Italy will not be able to prohibit the commercialisation of lab-grown meat from other countries when it gets approved by the European Commission, the law with have the effect of penalising Italian companies with respect to foreign companies. Foreign companies will continue to produce and export lab-grown meat in Italy, with all due respect to the Made in Italy label, which even has its own ministry. Not such a great outcome.
Marco Sonsini
Editorial
We have a guest for the March issue of PRIMOPIANOSCALAc who is double in everything she does and everything she is. Starting with her name, Vitalba (a combination of two words), and ending with her surname, Azzollini, with two z’s and two l’s. Even her job is double. She works in an independent authority and she is the proud, independent champion of administrative transparency. What does this mean? She fights, wielding a deadly weapon: an objective pen.
She fights for citizens so that they can be informed of the institutions’ activities, of how the decisions that heavily impact their lives are made, because as I often say, in any representative democracy, this process has to take place in the light of day, not “in secret and one-on-one”. In her interview she clearly explains what it means to be citizens and not “subjects of some public power”.
But all of this has a price. The most obvious was finding herself on the list of the most “hated” women on the web, created in 2021 by the Vox Italian Observatory on Rights, which takes a snapshot of hate on social media. Among the names of more or less famous but known women, such as Giorgia Meloni, Myrta Merlino, Selvaggia Lucarelli, Teresa Bellanova, Barbara D’Urso, Fiorella Mannoia, Cathy La Torre, Ilaria Capua, Emma Marrone, Chiara Ferragni and Antonella Viola, we find, treacherously, also Vitalba Azzollini- ranking 5th!
The haters on the web target free people who are not afraid of expressing their opinions, even though and especially when they go against the grain. Then if this person happens to be a woman, it becomes something unforgiveable, a sin that can only be cleansed with blood and virulence. On that occasion, Vitalba explained that the attacks aimed at her were mainly connected to issues relating to Covid.
Even though “I have never dealt with the topic of medicine, I remain strictly within my realm of expertise, which is law,” and failed to understand “on what basis” they were continuing to attack her. She added that “the method of these people was unusual, almost more an attack on me personally than my arguments. They were demeaning attacks, ad hominem, personal.” Writing clearly and directly, expressing very clear stances, “disrupts many narratives”, narratives that “I debunked in some of my tweets, because they were incoherent.”
As you browse the names of these most hated women, it is clear why many of them decided to step onto the battlefield: some are involved in politics, some want to gain audience, some talk about science. Instead, Vitalba, the nuisance, fights for ideas she believes in “without getting anything in return. It is hard to understand why I do it, and this seems to disorient many.”
One last note. Did you know that synthetic meat is a hoax? “Because there’s nothing synthetic about it.” There is lab-grown meat, “meaning that cells are taken from animals and grown in a lab” with regulations that are still being drafted. In just a few lines, Vitalba explains how things really are, debunking the current narrative. One more reason to devour her interview.
PRIMOPIANOSCALAc’s 2024 cover series is inspired by the works of Romano Gazzera, a Piedmontese painter known for his ‘giant’, ‘talking’, ‘flying’ flowers which, along with other iconographic themes connected to historical and collective memory, characterised and distinguished him as the frontrunner of the Italian Neo-floral school.
The covers won’t be only static, it will even have a more dynamic version, that will be launched on social media. For Vitalba we have chosen a simple yet graceful flower: the gerbera, whose elegance has caused it to be defined as the perfect daisy.
Its petals are long and pointed and come in a variety of brilliant colours, from cream to orange, fuchsia to purple, old rose to red, and classic milk white. The gerbera we chose for Vitalba have a special meaning: they represent cheerfulness and energy, strength and courage. A floral portrait of her.
And with this March issue, we here at Telos wish you a good spring into spring and a Happy Easter!
Mariella Palazzolo
Vitalba Azzollini is a jurist and works for an independent Authority. She is a fellow of the Bruno Leoni Institute and on the Scientific Committee of the Policy Observatory at Luiss Guido Carli University. She has authored articles and papers on legal issues. She is a columnist for the newspaper Domani. Vitalba writes for La Voce, Valigia Blu, Le Grand Continent and Phastidio, just to mention a few. She has contributed to the podcast Europea by Chora media, in collaboration with the Guida all’Europrogettazione (EuroPlanning Guide) on the challenges of integration and European identity.
But since writing about Vitalba means having to double everything… here is her, personal version:
“A jurist by trade and out of passion. I study because I love freedom, and studying makes us free. I study to write, and I write to make the things that regard everybody’s lives clearer to people. Knowledge is the end. ‘I love New York’ because I love contrast, dynamism, the search for happiness and the skyline.”
Marco Sonsini
SocialTelos