From the Rights of Citizen to the Fundamental Rights of Man: The Italian Experience

Abstract

The author, first of all, describes the provisions of the Italian Constitution concerning foreigners and explains some of the leading interpretations of those provisions at the time of the first rulings of the Constitution Court concerning foreigners’ rights (1967). Then he underlines the Constitutional Court judgements concerning foreigners until 1998. In those decisions the Court gave a sensible but careful interpretation of the Constitution stressing that only the “Inviolable Rights of Man” (Article 2) are granted to everybody. The author draws attention to the fact that at the end of the 1990s the law no. 40 of March 6, 1998 and the Decree no. 286 of July, 25 1998 afforded to the foreigners present at the border or within the State’s territory “the Fundamental Rights of Man”: a concept larger than that of Article 2. In other words, the Legislator assigned to the Constitutional Court and to the ordinary courts the tasks of identifying, case by case, which of the rights of the foreigners are liable to be qualified as “fundamental”.