Seven months after the Constellation fire, the judicial developments in the Crans-Montana tragedy now allow for an initial assessment of the measures taken by Palazzo Chigi in response to the suffering of the families involved. Three episodes in particular have left me with a profound sense of bitterness: the outcry over hospital invoices sent to those injured in the fire, the recall of the Italian ambassador following the release from custody of the venue’s manager and, most recently, the attempt - rejected by the Swiss prosecutor’s office - to have the Italian State admitted as a civil claimant in the criminal proceedings.
At first glance, such initiatives might appear to show a government determined to protect its citizens and give voice to their concerns. Look more closely, however, and a different picture emerges: an institutional approach in which the public display of solidarity with the victims appears to take precedence over the legal soundness of the actions being pursued. The outcomes only reinforce that impression: measures capable of generating considerable media attention, but far less convincing when tested against the relevant rules, jurisdictions and procedures.
Let us begin with the so-called “invoices”. In April, some of the Italian families of young people injured in the fire received copies from the Valais Hospital of accounting documents relating to the treatment provided in Sion, with figures running into tens of thousands of Swiss francs. The news immediately prompted a reaction from Rome and from the Italian ambassador to Switzerland. Yet the documents themselves clearly stated that the families were not required to pay those sums.
The Foreign Ministry nevertheless used that fake news to provoke a diplomatic row. In the Swiss healthcare system, as in the Italian one, hospital invoices are sent to the party responsible for covering the cost, while patients receive a copy so that they can check the services listed. The Valais authorities duly clarified that the families would not be liable for any of the costs and pointed out that they had already been informed of the procedure to follow should healthcare documents be delivered to their homes.
The real dispute, if anything, lay elsewhere: in the subsequent settlement of costs between Switzerland and Italy under the mechanisms governing international healthcare coordination. Palazzo Chigi instead turned even the sending of copies to the families into a political issue. On 4 May, Bern eventually decided that such documents would no longer be sent directly to relatives, explicitly “to avoid any misunderstanding”. It was therefore a decision taken for reasons of sensitivity and prudence, not the cancellation of a debt the families had never been asked to pay in the first place.
Treating the matter as a diplomatic incident had far more political and media value than practical substance. During the same period, Rome was also discussing the opposite issue with Bern: a Swiss request for reimbursement of around 100,000 francs for the treatment of three Italian youngsters, which Palazzo Chigi rejected on the basis of reciprocity - a principle with genuine substance in this case, given the medical care provided in Italy to Swiss citizens involved in the same fire. It was an administrative dispute between two healthcare systems, not a moral scandal.
The second episode concerns the release from custody of Jacques Moretti, the owner of the venue, ordered by the Sion court in January. The government responded by recalling Ambassador Cornado to Italy and making his return conditional on closer judicial cooperation between the two countries’ authorities. Decisions on pre-trial detention, however, fall entirely within the remit of the judiciary. Whether a suspect awaiting trial should remain in custody is not a matter for the executive, either in Valais or in Rome, where the principle of separation between politics and the judiciary is frequently invoked whenever a foreign government criticises a ruling by an Italian judge.
In short, Italy appears ready to lecture other legal systems with a confidence that is difficult to justify, particularly when one considers that, in all likelihood, the same case in Rome would have taken a far less straightforward course than it has in Switzerland.
The third chapter concerns Italy’s attempt to join the proceedings as a civil claimant, rejected by the Sion Public Prosecutor’s Office on 29 July with an explicit reference to Article 115 of the Swiss Code of Criminal Procedure: the injured parties are those who were inside the venue and whose physical integrity was harmed; the victims’ nationality and the expenditure incurred by Rome in assisting them fall outside that legal definition.
This came as no surprise to anyone who had been following the case and was familiar with Swiss criminal procedure. The same prosecutor’s office, and subsequently the Cantonal Court, had already denied the same status to the Municipality of Crans-Montana, a public authority far more closely connected to the events than the Italian State. Rome’s application was therefore made on legal ground that had already proved highly problematic, while the effective protection of the Italian victims has long followed a different route: the individual participation of family members as civil claimants, represented by their own lawyers and already involved in the proceedings in their personal capacity.
A hospital accounting for the treatment it has provided, a judge ordering the release of a suspect awaiting trial, a prosecutor simply applying the rules governing standing in criminal proceedings: none of these things is, in itself, unusual. They are part of the ordinary functioning of a legal system, just as Italian courts, prosecutors and healthcare institutions apply their own rules every day to foreign nationals involved in cases arising on Italian soil.
Recasting each of these developments as an affront to Italy, as though every unwelcome decision by the Swiss authorities amounted to an attack on national dignity, therefore looks above all like an exercise aimed at a domestic political audience. It speaks to that section of public opinion which the Meloni government’s messaging has accustomed to viewing legally complex issues through far simpler categories: wounded national pride, the foreigner showing us disrespect, the Italian State being called upon to flex its muscles. It is politically effective rhetoric, but legally threadbare.
Above all, it offers very little to the six families who have lost their children. Their concrete protection is proceeding through far less spectacular and far more serious channels: individual legal representation, the exercise of the rights granted to injured parties and judicial cooperation between the authorities of the two countries. Those mechanisms continue to operate regardless of whether the Italian State, in yet another attempt to exploit the tragedy for political gain, is admitted as a civil claimant in the proceedings.
One impression is therefore increasingly difficult to avoid: in the public narrative surrounding the Crans-Montana case, institutional outrage has gradually come to matter more than its actual legal effectiveness. Much emphasis, many statements, a number of diplomatic gestures with considerable symbolic impact; what is far harder to identify behind all this political theatre is any equally tangible procedural benefit for the families it claims to protect.
