Leaving aside political exploitation, which is never lacking, least of all in a moment like this of great tension between political and judicial power, the proceedings against Matteo Renzi and ten others pose two points for reflection which concern all of us as users of the justice system.
The case ended on 19 December with the decision not to proceed because “the elements acquired do not allow us to formulate a reasonable prediction of conviction” for all the suspects.
The first fact that catches the eye is the objectively long time taken for a preliminary hearing, which lasted two years and eight months. The length of proceedings is notoriously an additional and undue punishment for everyone, not just politicians: if this acquittal had arrived quickly, the damage to the image of those concerned would have been repaired much sooner and would have had a less serious impact.
One would expect, in a country where the justice work is always open and where reforms follow one another at an incessant pace, that at the top of the priorities would be the question of how to shorten trial times without damaging guarantees, and what time, energy and resources were used to pursue this objective which is not yet the most serious problem weighing on the Italian judicial system, a topic which however does not seem urgent, judging from the road map of the reforms under discussion.
The Renzi case, in this regard, could also be read among other things as proof that the judge’s alleged flattening of the position of his colleague PM, which would be the basis of the insistence on the separation of careers for those who support it, is not then a dogma: The Florence Gup decided by accepting the reasons of the defence, not those of the Prosecutor’s Office.
The impact of the Cartabia reform
The acquittal formula deserves further reflection: it is in fact the result of the strengthening of the filter that the Cartabia reform has assigned to the judge for investigations and for the preliminary hearing when evaluating the acquittal or committal to trial requested by the Prosecutor’s Office. Until October 2022, the criterion that the law assigned to the investigating judge to deny the indictment was either the unfoundedness of the accusation or the fact that the trial would be superfluous because it would not be able to bring further evidence before the judge .
Since that date, however, the law (Cartabia Reform) requires the investigating magistrate/magistrate to deny the committal to trial and declare no place to proceed whenever he does not have sufficient elements to reasonably predict that the sentence of the trial at the end of the hearing will be a conviction.
Basically the new law has entrusted the Judge for investigations and preliminary hearings with a stronger filter, with a view to starting fewer trials with uncertain outcomeswithout prejudice to the fact that in any case the full proof still takes place before the trial judge and that the one given by the investigating judge when he orders the trial is a prediction, with a margin of fallibility.
In the Renzi case this strengthened filter worked and was good news. This is a guaranteeist rule, favorable to the suspect, who is less likely to undergo a long trial that ends in acquittaland also useful to avoid flooding the system by spending human resources and public money on processes that can be avoided.
Resources are needed or a bottleneck is created
However, a critical issue remains: precisely this point of the reform can impact the duration of the proceedings at the preliminary hearing level. A reinforced filter is an increase in work, requires time and resources. And it’s going to insist on an office, that of the Investigating Judge/Gup, which is crucial in the system and which, due to its particular role, is burdened with all emergencies. In most districts it suffers from a shortage of staff among magistrates and administrators, and ends up risking prolonging time if a way is not found to distribute resources proportionate to the new tasks which the Cartabia reform undoubtedly makes more burdensome.
Since organic plants have not changed over time and are often discovered, it is easy to understand that we should think about this complexity in terms of organization and allocation of resources. Knowing, however, that there are no simple solutions, because training magistrates takes time and the function of investigating magistrate/magistrate under current law cannot be assumed upon the first appointment. As proof that the problem exists, the Nordio reform, which calls for a panel of three investigating magistrates to authorize a personal precautionary measure, was approved but postponed for two years, because at the moment there are not the people to implement it.
As for the work of the Prosecutor’s Office (whose prosecutors in the case in question were also reported by the suspect, investigated in turn and archived in other offices) one thing is not well understood: if the objective is to have a Public Prosecutor who reasons with the same guarantees as the judge, who has all the tools to foresee his decisions with a view to not starting trials that can be avoided, because one wants at all costs to separate the careers of prosecutors and judges rather than training them in the same cultureespecially since that type of reform won’t shorten trial times by a minute?
PARTY FINANCING, TRANSPARENT RULES TO PREVENT OPACITY AND INVESTIGATIONS
The second reflection concerns the contested crime: the illicit financing of political parties. This issue is also an age-old one in Italy: public funding from parties was removed, in the wake of public indignation for corruption following Clean Hands, 2 per thousand of the Irpef became marginal, impoverished by the disaffection of citizens who they rarely choose to allocate their share as a tax deduction to the parties, private financing remains. THEn the lack of rules regulating the so-called lobbies, in the absence of rules on conflict of interest, which the president of the Anti-corruption Authority Busia has been asking for for some time, the system risks lacking transparency.
Raffaele Cantone, former president of the National Anti-Corruption Authority, has repeatedly raised the problem over the years. The last time in an interview with La Stampa a month and a half ago: “The foundations created alongside the parties”, he explained, “are born with noble cultural purposes and the promotion of political ideas but in many cases they become a way to finance politics in an illicit and surreptitious way. The legislation, despite the timid innovations introduced by “Spazzacorrotti”, is not able to guarantee the transparency of funding and paradoxically this situation also damages those foundations that really want to engage in politics and not collect money”.
Legislation that allows for greater transparency could be a path to think about with a view to improving preventive controls and reducing opacity, real or apparent, which could then lead to criminal investigations.
