Despite the constitutional reform of 1993, prompted by the motions signed respectively by Fini, La Russa and Gasparri and by Bossi, Maroni and Castelli, in fact reduced the scope of parliamentary immunity, to implement a request for the arrest of the magistrates for a parliamentarian, the authorization of the Chamber to which he belongs is required. This is also the case for the Pope case and for the Milanese case, which in these hours are under the attention of an increasingly annoyed public opinion towards what it considers "a caste", engaged above all in protecting itself.
Even in the aftermath of a maneuver that has resorted to the relief of the pockets of the Italians, at the same time avoiding to cut the costs of politics. Yet in the history of Parliaments, immunity was born as a noble institution, aimed at protecting the autonomy of the people's elected officials from the intrusiveness of the Crown. At the beginning of the twentieth century the constitutionalist Vincenzo Miceli observed that "the most relevant character of parliamentary immunities is always that which derives from friction, from the state of perennial conflict in the relations between Parliament and the Crown", which he saw in Parliament " an indomitable adversary because it never missed an opportunity to restrict, define and contrast the instruments of law it possessed".
In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, then, parliamentary immunity can be traced back to the condemnation of the confiscation of assets for treason of the deputy Thomas Haxey, guilty of having submitted to the approval of the House of Commons a bill (approved in the session of 22 January-13 February 1397) which complained about the 'excessive expenditure of financial resources by the royal house. The king was Richard II. The parliamentarian was strenuously defended by his colleagues and later King Henry IV quashed the sentence. It is due to that episode that starting from the reign of Henry VIII, who ascended the throne in 1509, at the beginning of the Legislature, the speaker (the president of the Chamber) will address this petition to the king: "In the name, and in the interest of the Commons, by humble petition recall their ancient and undisputed rights and privileges, that particularly that their persons, their servants, may be free from arrest, or from any harassment whatsoever, that the members may enjoy freedom in any discussion, may have access to His Majesty's person, in the most favorable manner".
In short, noble and ancient are the roots of parliamentary immunities. But one wonders if what was noble to safeguard the parliamentarian Thomas Haxey from the harassment of a king who did not want Parliament to scrutinize how the king spent public money, is also valid today when, perhaps for quite similar reasons, the judiciary requests the arrest of the honorable Pope.
