Giorgio Agamben, speech on the green pass to the Commission on Constitutional Affairs of the Senate, October 7, 2021
“I will focus only on two points that I would like to bring to the attention of the parliamentarians who will have to vote on the conversion of the Decree into law. The first is the evident, I stress the word evident, contradiction in the Decree in question. You know that the Government with a special Decree Law, number 44 of 2021, called the criminal shield, now converted into law, has exempted itself from any liability for damage caused by the vaccine. And how serious these damages can be is shown by the fact that Article 3 of the Decree in question, explicitly mentions Articles 589 and 590 of the Criminal Code, which refer to manslaughter and negligent injury.
As authoritative jurists have noted, this means that the State does not feel responsible for a vaccine that has not completed its testing phase and yet, at the same time, tries to force citizens to vaccinate themselves by any means, otherwise excluding them from social life and now, with the new Decree that you are called to vote, even depriving them of the possibility of working. Is it possible to imagine a situation legally and morally more abnormal? How can the state accuse of irresponsibility those who choose not to vaccinate, when it is the same state that first formally disclaims any responsibility for the possible serious consequences, remember the articles 589 590, death and injury from the vaccine. Here I would like the parliamentarians to reflect on this contradiction that in my opinion configures a real legal monstrosity.
The second point on which I would like to draw your attention does not concern the medical problem of the vaccine but the political one of the green pass, which should not be confused with the first, we have done so many vaccines without this forcing us to show a certificate. It has been said by scientists and doctors that the green pass has no medical meaning in itself, but serves to force people to get vaccinated. I believe instead that we can and should say the opposite, namely that the vaccine is a means to force people to have a green pass, that is a device that allows you to control and track, a measure that has no precedent, their movements. Political scientists have known for some time that our societies have long since moved from the model once called societies of discipline to the model of societies of control, societies founded on virtually unlimited digital control of individual behaviors that thus become quantifiable in an algorithm. We are now becoming accustomed to these control devices, but I wonder how far we are willing to accept that this control goes? Is it possible that citizens and a society that claims to be democratic, find themselves in a worse situation than the citizens of the Soviet Union under Stalin?
You may know that Soviet citizens were obliged to show a pass of confirmation of their address for every movement from one city or town to another, but we are obliged to show a green pass even to go to a restaurant, even to go to a museum, even to go to the cinema, and now, what is even more serious, with the decree that is being converted into law, even every time we go to work. Furthermore, how is it possible to accept that for the first time in the history of Italy, after the Fascist laws of 1938 on non-Aryans, second class citizens are created who are subject to restrictions that from a strictly legal point of view — obviously the two phenomena have nothing to do with each other and — I am speaking only of legal analogy — are subject to restrictions that are identical to those suffered by non-Aryans. In other words, everything suggests that the Decree-Laws should be framed in a process of transformation of the institutions and paradigms of government of the society in which we find ourselves. A transformation that is all the more insidious because, as was the case with Fascism, they take place without there being a change in the text of the Constitution, but they take place surreptitiously. The model that is thus eroded and cancelled is that of parliamentary democracies with their rights, their constitutional guarantees, and in their place is replaced by a paradigm of government in which, in the name of biosecurity and control, individual liberties are destined to suffer increasing limitations. The exclusive concentration of attention on health and contagion seems to me to prevent us from perceiving what the meaning of this great transformation is — and from realizing how governments themselves never tire of reminding us that security and emergencies are not transitory phenomena but constitute the new form of governance. I believe that in this perspective it is urgent that parliamentarians consider the political transformation underway with extreme attention, and that they do not dwell only on health. In the long run, this is destined to empty Parliament of its powers, reducing it, as is happening now, to simply approving, in the name of biosecurity, decrees issued by organizations and people that have little to do with Parliament.
Thank you.”
