Euro Vision

Staff Profile: Franco Rizzuto,
Head of Law and Criminology

I have always felt like an outsider. My family moved from southern Italy to Alderney in the Channel Islands in the 1950s when I was five. We were pretty much the only foreigners on the island at that time. Alderney had been occupied by the Germans only recently and everyone knew the Italians had sided with Germany, so we were treated with suspicion.

I have always been interested in boundaries – cultural, psychological and physical. Not surprising when you come from a three-mile long island! I’m also fascinated by rules; I like to test rules, even if they are ones that I have imposed on myself. I’ve made myself quite unpopular in the past, particularly at school and college, by questioning the rules and boundaries set by others, but I don’t see the point of rules if they are only self-serving. I think this has influenced my academic career, which has focused on European law – how you can work within and around all those boundaries and find things that unite and unify.

My Italian heritage is important to me but I don’t consider myself an Italian. I also don’t feel like a Channel Islander or a British person. If anything, I feel European. My wife is French, we live in England, my children were born in France and Wales, we speak three languages and have family in six European countries. I feel very at home in this thing we call Europe. I don’t see the EU as a monster trying to oppress us or as a kind of cultural straitjacket, I see it as an interesting way of developing relationships. The EU might not be the sole reason there hasn’t been another world war, but it has to help, surely.

I have never watched The Sopranos. I am interested in the mafia partly due to my background and partly because of the rules that surround it. I find organised crime fascinating as a manifestation of the failure of the state. Anywhere where there is an absence of societal trust and a weak civic culture, mafia activity becomes systemic. But I’m not interested in anything that glamorises or attempts to normalise the mafia. There are places that are completely blighted by mafia activity, where people live in fear, violence and corruption rule, and the state does not have the courage, or the inclination, to stop it. That’s the reality of the mafia.

Internet piracy is the area of law that really excites me these days. There is a new area of law that has grown up around digital communications that is fascinating. How do you police petty piracy on the internet? There seems to be a gap in the rules and that’s interesting to me. If you download something for free or steal someone’s idea, what is the penalty – and, more importantly – who decides? If your access to the internet is cut off, is that a breach of your human rights? If it isn’t policed properly, will that stifle creativity as people become reluctant to share their intellectual property on the internet? The digital age has opened up vast opportunities and the law is now trying to catch up.