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February 14, 2020 In the matter of prescription, the council and ministers amended the Criminal Code so that the prescription remains suspended by a sentence of first instance sentence until the date of enforceability of the sentence, and that the same resumes its course, when the Appeal sentence acquits the accused or annuls the sentencing sentence. The government aims to simplify and speed up criminal proceedings with a one-year delegation law within which to reform the Code of Criminal Procedure.

These are the most significant elements of the reform:

- modification of the rules on notifications. It is expected that all notifications subsequent to the first, which however must necessarily be made to the accused, are made to the defender, also electronically;

- the redefinition of the duration of the preliminary investigations. The delegation identifies three terms of duration, linked to the seriousness of the crime being investigated. The terms will be six months for less serious crimes, one year for ordinary crimes and eighteen months for crimes of greater social alarm and associative crimes of mafia or terrorist nature or definable of particular complexity for the number of defendants or of indictments. The duration will be extendable only once, six months, at the request of the prosecutor, with the judge's provision for preliminary investigations;

- the provision that, once the maximum term of the preliminary investigations has expired, the prosecutor is required, within a further period of 3, 6 or 12 months depending on the type of crime, to request the filing or exercise the action criminal. After this deadline, the prosecutor will be required to notify the suspect of the end of the investigation and reveal the content of the related documents. It will therefore be the faculty of the parties to request the indictment or the filing;

- rules aimed at reducing the number of trials reaching the trial phase, with more stringent criteria in relation to the rule of judgment to which the public prosecutor and the judge of the preliminary hearing must comply for the exercise of the criminal action or the acceptance of the request for indictment;

- the provision that, in drawing up the organizational program of the Public Prosecutor, the Prosecutor indicates the criteria of priority in the exercise of the criminal action, to be agreed with the Prosecutor General and with the President of the Court, based on the specific criminal reality and territorial and human, financial and technological resources available to the office;

- the introduction of the judge's assessment of the possible backdating of the registration of the suspect in the appropriate register and the consequent sanction of the non-usability of the investigative measures carried out on terms that have already expired;

- the extension of the possibility of plea bargaining to all the cases of crime to which a penalty of less than eight years, compared to the current five, is rebalanced by an expansion of the list of crimes that exclude a plea bargain in advance;

- rules for encouraging the use of conditional abbreviated judgment, on the schedule of hearings and on the terms for filing the expert reports.

In addition to establishing the criteria for the delegation for the reform of the criminal trial, the text introduces further provisions to speed up the ongoing proceedings in the Courts of Appeal, as well as rules on suspension of the prescription.

In particular, to speed up the ongoing proceedings, the possibility of employing the honorary auxiliary judges is extended, who today have the possibility to exercise only the function of integrating the college in the civil sector, also to the criminal sector, and an increase is expected of the staff of the honorary auxiliary judges of 500 units, from today 350 to 850. In addition, the hiring, with a fixed-term contract of 24 months, also in excess, of 1,000 units of administrative staff is authorized.