Italy recalls ambassador to Brazil as row escalates

extradite a former far-left militant convicted in four killings in Italy.
“Foreign Minister Franco Frattini has decided on the temporary recall to Rome for consultations of the ambassador to Brasilia, Gherardo La Francesca,” the Italian foreign ministry said in a statement.
Frattini told reporters: “We want to know what the atmosphere was in which such a disappointing judicial procedure took place.”
“We got a political decision, not a legal one. Faced with this, there is no room for diplomacy,” he added.
Cesare Battisti walked free from a Brazilian prison on Thursday after the Supreme Court (STF) rejected his extradition to Italy, which has said it will now appeal to the United Nations’ highest court in The Hague.
“We will be able to obtain through an international judicial appeal what we weren’t able to obtain through a national judicial appeal,” Frattini said.
“We respect the suffering of the relatives of the victims,” he added.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s spokeswoman said earlier she had been informed of the ruling and the reaction in Italy, “and her only comment is that a decision by the STF must be abided by – it’s not a matter for debate”.
A lawyer for Battisti, who fled an Italian jail but has protested his innocence, said he would apply for a permanent residence visa in Brazil.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi earlier expressed “great regret” and said: “We are going to go to The Hague, we have no other option.”
“What are we going to do, wage war on Brazil?” he told reporters on Thursday.
The UN’s International Court of Justice in The Hague is intended to settle legal disputes between states.
Battisti, whose cause has attracted some support from far-left intellectual circles in Brazil and France and who has written several novels, has been in jail fighting extradition for the past four years.
A member of the radical Armed Proletarians for Communism (PAC) group, he became an international fugitive after escaping from an Italian jail in 1981 and spent decades evading justice, living in Mexico, France and Brazil.
Battisti was convicted in his absence of murdering a prison guard and a police investigator, as well as being an accomplice in the murder of a butcher and organising an attack on a jewellery shop that left one man dead.
Maurizio Campagna, the brother of the policeman killed, said the Brazilian ruling was “a moral slap in the face.” Alberto Torregiani, whose jeweller father was killed, said it was “a blow to the stomach.” – AFP.