`Lettori' resist second-class status with EU aid

It seems that the Orientale University of Naples will not learn. The authorities of the college have sacked Dr Victoria Primhak twice, only to see her reinstated twice by the Naples court. She is now working on a contract imposed by the court on the university while the latter appeals the decision. That could take years.

The state of war between Dr Primhak, a Londoner, and her employer goes back to 1994 when she sued it over the mass sacking of herself and 43 colleagues, all foreign lecturers, lettori, at the university which specialises in foreign language teaching. Their crime: to refuse to accept permanent second-class status to their Italian colleagues by accepting contracts as technicians while performing the same work as lecturers.

Dr Primhak's case is one of a thousand cases currently before the Italian courts on the part of foreign lecturers in a similar situation. It is a legal saga of Bleak House proportions which has seen not only dozens of rulings in the notoriously slow-moving Italian courts but two in the lecturers' favour in the European Court of Justice, the EU's Luxembourg-based court.

They have also been backed by two resolutions of the European Parliament as well as parliamentarians and ministers in many countries. The Irish Government has promised to speak on their behalf next time it comes to the Court of Justice.

Now the Commission legal services, on the instruction of the Social Affairs Commissioner, Mr Padraig Flynn, is suing Italy under Article 169 of the European Treaty, arguing that Italy has failed to implement its previous decisions. If successful and the Italian authorities fail again to act, the Commission will be able to ask the court to impose a fine.

By that time, Dr Primhak fears she will be old and grey and she is now convinced that the Commission has fatally undermined its own case.

At stake is one of the fundamental principles of the EU - the free movement of labour and the principles that underpin it. The persistent refusal of the Italian university authorities to pay foreign lecturers on the same scale as Italian lecturers, to recognise continuity of employment, and their refusal to hold fair competitions for full academic posts have been found to be in breach of European law and are, without doubt, the clearest mass systematic breaches of the treaty.

Yet the Italian authorities have proved utterly ineffectual in the face of repeated mass sackings - 218 in all - and intimidation. The local academic trade unions have simply turned a blind eye.

Some 1,500 of the foreign lecturers have banded together in the Association of Foreign Lecturers in Italy. The 40 Irish members of the union are represented by Dr Henry Rodgers, a lecturer in economic terminology at the University of La Sapienza in Rome. He speaks bitterly of "a third of a working life" taken up with the seemingly endless battle.

They are led by an indefatigable Scot, Mr David Petrie, himself a victim of sacking in Verona. "What the university authorities are saying to us is, `if you dare take us to court we'll keep you in court for the rest of your lives', " he says. Indeed, the union has been advised that it has a sustainable case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg over the length of time the Italian judicial system takes to rule.

Enlisting the support of the Commission has been important, but Mr Petrie is now worried that it appears to be backing off. When the Italian authorities recently supplied the Commission and the court with details of their case, some of the papers were leaked to the lecturers. They were furious to discover what they allege are serious attempts to mislead the court by the authorities. To make matters worse, they say, the Commission appears to have responded by amending its case, seriously diluting it.

Dr Primhak has now opened a "denunciation" procedure with the Director of Public Prosecutions in Naples in an attempt to order the authorities to correct their evidence. Details of the case are covered in a legal veil of secrecy.

But Dr Petrie met Mr Flynn this week to ask unsuccessfully for the Commission to hold back its response to the court until the Naples procedure is complete.

Although the Commission is ostensibly acting on their behalf, they are not technically parties to the Article 169 procedure and Dr Petrie is blunt about his frustration at Mr Flynn's refusal to release full details of the Italian pleadings and his apparent refusal to investigate their claims that they are misleading.

Sources in the Commission say that it is as committed as ever to the case and not diluting at all the principle that Italy must be forced to grant the lecturers the rights it is denying them. The sources say it has simply rationalised its case by citing nine rather than 20 universities to fight the case on the most sustainable grounds.

They say the allegedly misleading information from the Italian authorities arrived after the new strategy was developed and did not influence the decision. Confidentiality, they say, is a requirement of the court.

Meanwhile, the lecturers have thrown themselves back into the political fray, enlisting support once again among MEPs for a new resolution to Parliament.