by Henry Rodgers

When I emigrated from Ireland to Italy in 1988 I had no inkling that I would become involved in a marathon campaign to end discrimination against foreign language lecturers in Italian universities. That I would return some years later to address and persuade the Irish parliament to press for the prosecution of Italy for its second class treatment of myself and my 1,500 colleagues was something I never foresaw when I was leaving. While I was aware of the roles of the European Court of Justice and the European Parliament within the overall European Union framework, I never imagined that I would have recourse to these pinnacle institutions, which would respectively pass key judgments and resolutions censuring Italy for discrimination in its universities.  Practically illiterate and unread in law, there were certainly no grounds to suppose that I would write critically on the foreign lecturers’ case for legal and specialist magazines-much less that my contribution would be cited in the prestigious and recently published European Union Law: Text, Cases, and Materials from Oxford University Press, the most authoritative and widely prescribed textbook for law students in European universities.

While I was eventually to become a prominent campaigner, I did not become actively involved until the mid 90s. By then, litigation taken by colleague Pilar Allué, who taught Spanish language and literature at the Università degli Studi di Venezia, had established landmark rights for the 1,500 non-Italian foreign language lecturers in Italy and campaigning was thereafter mostly a matter of seeking to have these rights enforced. Ironically, the foreign lecturer unions have consistently damaged the interests of the members who finance them, with most good coming from private and unsponsored initiatives like Allué’s. What improvements have taken place in our working conditions, what compensatory settlements have been won before local Italian courts for denied rights, are ultimately traceable to the Allué case law on discrimination.

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