The Legal Symbiosis. The State, Ilva and Harm Made Lawful

In the previous essay I described the American science of the crimes of the powerful and its crux: the "State that lets it happen", the State which — its regulator captured — stops seeing the harm done by the enterprise. One question remains: and here at home? A recent academic article, open-access to boot, takes those same tools and points them at a case we all know — the Ilva of Taranto. What emerges is a portrait in which the Italian State does something more naked than simply failing to see: it legislates, obstinately, so that production shall not stop. And thus it makes lawful, for years, an established harm to health.

An Italian case, seen through foreign eyes

The article is by Carlo Nicoli Aldini, published in 2024 in Crime, Law and Social Change — one of the field’s journals of reference — and it has the rare merit of being freely accessible.1 Its thesis is clear-cut and, for us, precious: in the Ilva case “the law became, for seven years, the channel through which the Italian State and Ilva established a symbiotic relationship” which created the conditions for the harm to be produced and reproduced.

To say this, Aldini imports the categories we lack. The first is that of state-corporate crime, crime at the intersection of State and enterprise, and Kramer and Michalowski’s distinction between corporate crime initiated by the State and corporate crime facilitated by the State — the latter being the case in which the State “operates on its own regulatory capacity to create legal conditions favourable to the offending enterprise”.2 The second is the critical corrective of Steve Tombs and David Whyte: one must look not at the “moments of rupture” — the single disaster, the single failure — but at the ordinary and continuous relationship between State and enterprise, at the “symbiosis” and the “regimes of permission” that make the harm structurally possible.3 The third is the notion of social harm: since it is the State that decides, with its political power, what is a “crime” and what is not, it is better to study harm — the impairments to people’s well-being — rather than crime as labelled by the law.4 It is, word for word, the method of this blog.

The facts: the harm is established

It is worth fixing the facts, because everything rests on them. Taranto has lived with Ilva — one of the largest steelworks in Europe — since 1964; for decades the factory was the city’s largest employer, and the city became economically dependent on it.1 In 1995 the State privatised it, selling it to the Riva group: a deregulation which, the literature observes, weakened the role of the State and handed the enterprise a position of dominance over institutions and civil society.1

On the harm to health there has long been no dispute. The national epidemiological studies (the SENTIERI series) have for more than a decade photographed a critical situation;5 and — this is the point a jurist cannot ignore — two expert reports ordered by the judiciary established a causal link between Ilva’s production and mortality and morbidity in Taranto. The chemical expert report found high concentrations of pollutants coming from the factory; the epidemiological expert report, entrusted by the judge for preliminary investigations Patrizia Todisco to Forastiere, Biggeri and Triassi, established the grave impact on the health of the population.6 On the basis of those expert reports, on 25 July 2012 the judge ordered the seizure of the plant’s “hot areas”.7

It was then that the conflict exploded, in the form of a blackmail that is itself a diagnosis: workers at the gates shouting that “it is better to die of cancer than of hunger”.8 It is the “impossible choice” between work and health that Barca and Leonardi have pointed to as the paradigmatic example of environmental injustice: a subaltern community is asked to choose which right to sacrifice.1

The symbiosis: reading the laws in sequence

Here begins the part that concerns us most. Faced with a judicial seizure founded on expert reports that established the harm, what does the State do? It does not close the plant, does not make remediation a precondition. It legislates. Aldini reconstructs seven years — from 2011 to 2017 — of “frenetic and compulsive law-making” on Ilva: searching “Ilva AND Taranto” in the Normattiva database and supplementing it with the official lists of Parliament and the Ministry, he arrives at a corpus of nineteen laws devoted to the case, almost all directed at a single purpose — keeping alive the Integrated Environmental Authorisation (the AIA), the legal condition for producing, by amending it, extending it, postponing its implementation.9 These are the measures the press christened the “save-Ilva decrees”.

The decisive move is the most revealing: with a decree of 2012 the government allowed the activity to continue despite the criminal seizure — the law overriding the judge. Placed in sequence, and set beside the epidemiological reports that were accumulating in the meantime, those provisions tell one thing only: the State’s response to the mounting evidence of harm was not to stop it, but to make it lawful. It is in this sense that the symbiosis between State and business becomes, Aldini writes, a legal symbiosis: the “regime of permission” does not lie in a closed eye, but is written, in black and white, in the laws.1

The point of arrival comes in January 2023, and closes the circle. The government adopts decree no. 2/2023 which, in connection with Ilva’s production, guarantees a form of immunity from criminal consequences; and in Taranto the Genitori Tarantini take to the streets with one banner reading “A mass genocide is under way here” and another demanding “No immunity. Let the polluter pay”, while a demonstrator marches dressed as a judge with his hands bound.10 The image is worth a thesis: criminal law gagged by statute.

The point

This is why the Ilva case is the perfect bridge between the theory that comes from abroad and what we see at home. American criminology describes a State that, captured, does not see. Italy offers a more extreme variant of it: a State that sees perfectly well — it has the expert reports, it has the numbers, it even has a seizure ordered by its own judges — and yet legislates so as not to stop. Not the omission, but the positive act; not the silence of the regulator, but the voice of the legislator. The "State that lets it happen" here becomes the "State that makes it happen".

It is not only a criminologist who says so. In 2019 the European Court of Human Rights, in Cordella and Others v. Italy, ruled against the Italian State for failing to protect the health and private life of the inhabitants of Taranto from Ilva’s emissions: a violation of Article 8 of the Convention.11 The harm, even before being a “crime”, is a fact recognised by the highest court of rights in Europe.

A methodological clarification is due. The criminal trial over Ilva — the “Ambiente Svenduto” strand — is a different matter from this discussion; it has had a troubled course and the convictions pronounced are not final: no one is being put on trial here, and personal criminal liability remains to be established in the competent forums.12 The point of Aldini’s essay, and of this page, is another and deeper one: that in Taranto the harm to health was, for years, legal. And that a thing can be legal and unjust at once — indeed, it can be unjust precisely because someone made it legal.

It is the lesson we have been repeating for as long as this blog has existed, and which the Ilva case carves into the flesh of a city: a law that legalises the harm of the strong is not the failure of criminal law. It is its reversal. And the impossible choice between bread and life is not a destiny: it is the product of laws that someone wrote, and that someone could rewrite.

Notes

whitecollarcrimes a collective byline · guarantor: Avv. Luca Santa Maria · 18 June 2026