Carlo Taormina

Carlo Taormina (born 16 December 1940) is an Italian lawyer, politician, jurist, and academic. Taormina was the defense lawyer of some of the most controversial trials in modern Italian history, from that of the Ustica affair to the trial of the Nazi Erich Priebke, and to the Abu Omar case and the Cogne homicide case. He entered politics in 1996, joining Forza Italia, the political party of Silvio Berlusconi. That same year, he ran for the Chamber of Deputies but was not elected.

Taormina was elected a deputy in 2001 but was not included among the candidates for re-election in 2006, after which he left politics. Taormina was Deputy Group Leader of Forza Italia in the Chamber of Deputies, and was briefly state undersecretary of the Ministry of the Interior; he had to resign due to defending some mafia defendants. He also extended the law of legitimate suspicion, one of the many Berlusconi's ''ad personam'' laws, and headed several parliamentary commissions, such as the inquiry into the death of Ilaria Alpi and Miran Hrovatin. In 2009 and 2010, he was the unsuccessful candidate for The Autonomy and Italy League to the European Parliament and the Regional Council of Lazio, respectively.

After the end of his full-time political career in 2006, Taormina became one of the main commentators for the Italian sports talk program ''Il processo di Biscardi''. In 2008, he founded his own movement, Italy League, which ended in 2011. That same year, he became an independent politician close to Lega Nord, and since 2014 was close to the Five Star Movement (M5S), which he joined in 2016. After leaving the M5S in 2019, he founded Free Italy with New Force and former M5S militants in 2020. In 2022, he also joined South calls North, and was the party's unsuccessful candidate for that year's general election.

In addition to the individuals that he defended as a lawyer, including a former ''SS'' captain, mafia defendants, and neo-fascist leaders, Taormina attracted criticism for his comments about gay people. In 2014, he was convicted of discrimination on the job of homosexual individuals; the sentence was upheld in 2015 and 2020. Provided by Wikipedia