“Overcoming Critical Issues” of Justice which have a heavy impact on the state budget (-2% of GDP). With these words the Minister of Justice Carlo Nordio opened its intervention in the Judiciary Commission in the Senate presenting the programmatic lines of his department.
In addition to announcing a organic simplification of the sector, the Minister affirmed the need for a “deep review" in the criminal field.
Among the topics covered, two were the key points that aroused greater attention: the review of interceptions , separation of careers between the prosecutors and the judges.
Nordio: 'Eavesdropping must be a means of research not an evidence tool'
Minister Nordio promised to “Propose a profound revision” of the wiretapping regulations and stated: “we will rigorously supervise any dissemination that is arbitrary and improper".
For the Keeper of the Seals “La presumption of innocence has been and continues to be flawed in many ways: the excessive and instrumental use of interceptions, their shrewd selection with controlled diffusion, the criminal action that has become arbitrary and almost capricious, the adoption of pre-trial detention as an instrument of investigative pressure, the distortion of the guarantee information that has become a conviction advance media coverage and even an instrument for ousting political opponents”.
La dissemination of interceptions during trials, says Nordio “they also constitute a danger to the privacy and honor of the people involved, which are often not even investigated. Their diffusion, sometimes selected and perhaps controlled, cit constitutes a deadly instrument of personal and often political delegitimation. These are substantial, almost blasphemous violations of article 15 of the Constitution, which establishes the secrecy of communications as an interface of freedom. Pascal said that if everyone knew what we say about others, we wouldn't have a friend. The vote is secret because it is free, without secrecy there is no freedom."
“You are not never seen a sentence imposed on the sole basis of wiretaps, which should be a means of finding evidence and not an evidence tool,” added the Minister.
Nordio focused on theexcessive use of interceptions in Italy: "As regards the citizen's honor and freedom of communication, in Italy the number of telephone, environmental, directional, telematic interceptions, up to the trojan and who knows what other tools tomorrow, is far above the European average, and even more than that of the Anglo-Saxon countries. Their cost is very high, with hundreds of millions of euros a year. Most of these are done on the basis of simple suspicions, e they accomplish nothing. She's never seen, and I speak for 40 years of the public prosecutor's office a sentence imposed on the sole basis of wiretaps, which should be a means of finding evidence, while they have become a very fragile evidence tool, as such, which dissolves in the face of the adversarial hearing, in a procedural context where omissions and transcription errors of the same interceptions can even emerge ".
Need for a real separation between prosecutors and judges
The other major point touched by Nordio in his speech was to affirm “theneed for a real separation between prosecutor and judge".
"In theAnglo-Saxon legal system the discretion of prosecution is bound to objective criteria” and the magistrates are required to respect “the concrete social alarm aroused by the various crimes and the probability of success of the investigation, the sequence, the priority of these investigations”. In Italy, continues Nordio, “on the contrary the mandatory has been maintained and expresses the duty of the magistrate to proceed whenever he becomes aware of a crime guaranteeing the equality of citizens before the law, in fact it has become an iintolerable arbitrariness".
According to Nordio “Nella management of thousands of files the public prosecutor is unable to deal with it entirely due to lack of resources and therefore it is forced to make a choice. Not only that, but he can find ideas to investigate everyone without answering anyone. The system confers to the initiatives and ambitions of some magistrates, fortunately few, ahegemony made more incisive by the absence of responsibility in case of mismanagement".
“As chief of the judicial police, in fact, the pm has real executive authoritya but as a magistrate he enjoys the guarantee of the judges and so it is released from those Checks which in every democracy accompany and limit the exercise of a power” said the Minister.
This Pthere was no problem before "because the legal system and the codes of criminal procedure were different: the judicial police carried out the investigations with a margin of autonomy and at the end handed over the results to the prosecutor who was the coordinator of the investigations, the one who guaranteed a legality and legitimacy filter in the transmission to the judge of what deserved to be judged. Thus the belonging of the judge and the prosecutor to the same judicial order was justified with the code of criminal procedure, the change was substantial“. Today, according to Nordio, the “pm plays a completely different role than the judge and therefore it doesn't make sense for it to be in the same order".
Revolt of the ANM: interceptions are a very important tool
"The eavesdropping is a very important tool especially in the fight against mafia and terrorist crime” underlined the president of the ANM Giuseppe Santalucia.
President Santalucia is “absolutely in agreement that interceptions must not cause injury to the right of privacy but he affirms that "the use superior to that of other countries" in Italy is due to the profound presence of mafia organizations.
Also a thought on the separation of careers: “Separating careers means creating the premise for placing the prosecutor under the political control of the minister. Making criminal prosecution a discretionary action means entrusting it to politics. We don't believe this is an improvement for our democracy."
