Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-27-Speech-5-030"
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"en.20001027.2.5-030"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the case of non-Italian foreign language assistants in Italian universities is well known in the Commission and in most European institutions. This affair has been ongoing for more than a decade and, as a result of intervention on the part of the European institutions, in particular the Commission, the situation of the assistants has improved.
As you know, the issue is very complex and concerns some seven hundred people working in more than 25 Italian universities. Throughout this decade, the Commission has worked assiduously to resolve the problem of foreign language assistants in Italy in respect of the free movement of workers, which is guaranteed by the Treaty. As you have highlighted, the Court of Justice has already delivered three judgments concerning language assistants and, with the case pending in Luxembourg, the Commission has taken action aimed at further improving the situation.
More particularly, following the decisions of the Court of Justice of 1989 and 1993 – the Allué case – which ruled that the limitations on the duration of employment contracts of foreign-language assistants imposed by the Italian government were discriminatory, the Commission took a number of steps. It initiated an infringement procedure, which was dropped in 1995 following an Italian law bringing the legislation into line with the Court ruling.
As regards the language assistants' subsequent claims concerning their acquired rights, the Commission launched another infringement procedure on the grounds that, in a certain number of Italian universities, the assistants' acquired rights were not being duly safeguarded. In fact, the Commission mobilised a lot of its resources in order to examine this case. In fact, the services of the Commission put together hundreds of pages of documentation on specific cases in a number of universities. We exchanged a great deal of correspondence with the players concerned and went to a great deal of trouble to select from among piles of irrelevant documents the elements that proved conclusively that the former
had in fact been the victims of discrimination by certain Italian universities in respect of their financial acquired rights such as salaries and contributions to pension schemes.
In July 1999, the Commission brought this infringement procedure before the Court of Justice. It is now waiting for the Court to rule on this new infringement and on this new procedure, which was initiated by the Commission.
The assistants not only invoked the lack of protection of their acquired rights, they also deplored the new legal system set up by the Italian legislation of 1995. They believed that the Italian state should have integrated them into the category of members of the academic teaching staff or, failing that, it should have created a specific category for them among the teaching staff. In the opinion of the assistants, this right would follow directly from the right of workers to free movement. On this point, however, the Commission was not in agreement with the assistants.
It is our view that freedom of movement enables European citizens not to be the victims of discrimination under national systems of law. It does not give them the right to a special legal status. Each Member State is fully within its right to establish the provisions governing its own public service. Community legislation cannot prevent Italy from amending the provisions governing the status of former
and from transforming them into linguistic experts with partially different attributions. If the Italian legal system is reformed and modified, as it was in respect of academic teaching staff, we do not think that the Commission can intervene given that every European citizen has equal access to all categories of professions. Indeed, any European citizen may become a permanent member of the teaching body by taking part in the appropriate
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