If there were no European-friendly prime ministers like Mario Draghi in power in Rome, but a head of government like Mateusz Morawiecki, Viktor Orbán or Janez Janša: The call for legal proceedings against Italy would be unmistakable in Brussels and Strasbourg.

No other EU state has passed so many judgments at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg than Italy.

Since 1959, Italy has been convicted by the ECHR 1202 times for the extremely long length of court proceedings alone.

Matthias Rüb

Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta based in Rome.

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In second place in this inglorious ranking is Turkey with 608 convictions.

Turkey is a member of the Council of Europe and is therefore subject to the case law of the ECHR.

However, it is not a member of the EU and is not (no longer) regarded by many EU states as a constitutional state.

If you take the ECHR rulings as a yardstick, then rule of law principles are violated only half as badly as by EU founding member Italy.

More than a decade

In criminal proceedings, according to the latest surveys by the Ministry of Justice in Rome, it takes an average of 478 days to a judgment in the first instance.

An appeal process takes another 1038 days.

The court of cassation then pronounces its judgment in the last instance after another 287 days.

In total, there are 1,800 days, i.e. almost five years, until a procedure is completed.

That's an average.

Criminal proceedings that last longer than a decade are not uncommon in Italy.

The situation is even more bleak for civil litigation.

On average, it takes around 500 days for a judge's verdict in the first instance, another 800 days for an appeal judgment, and another 1,300 days for a decision by the court of cassation.

Together, that makes a good seven years on average.

Anyone who has patience, money and good lawyers in Italy can only be right that justice is slowly being pronounced.

The offense or even the crime is then statute-barred until the proceedings have been concluded.

The last government under Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte tried to solve the problem of statute of limitations in what was at best a rudimentary judicial reform: According to the law formulated by the then Justice Minister Alfonso Bonafede of the left-wing populist five-star movement, the limitation period expired in criminal proceedings after a conviction suspended in the first instance.

This was to prevent the accused and their lawyers from "playing for time" and using new procedural tricks to drag out the process until no further penalty can be imposed due to the statute of limitations.

Giustizialisti versus Garantisti

With this reform, the so-called “giustizialisti” of the five stars may have achieved their goal that no criminal and, above all, no corrupt politician should escape his punishment. But it did not shorten the duration of proceedings, on the contrary. According to the Ministry of Justice, it took more than twice as long in 2020 as in the previous year for criminal proceedings to be concluded between the second and third instance. The pandemic and the lockdown may also have contributed to this, as many court dates had to be postponed.

But the "garantisti", who want to see the rights of the citizen also guaranteed as a criminal, saw in Bonafede's partial judicial reform a free ticket for an encroaching judicial system that is now able to pull through every process to the bitter end for the defendants regardless of its proven dysfunction .

Prime Minister Draghi and his Justice Minister Marta Cartabia, most recently chairman of the Supreme Court, can no longer do piecemeal work on the overdue judicial reform.

After all, Draghi was able to ensure that Brussels has already agreed in principle to make payments from the EU's so-called reconstruction fund, of which Italy receives by far the largest share of all EU countries, although Italy’s judicial reform has so far only been a promise.

Rome is obliged to reduce the duration of criminal trials by at least 25 percent, and that of civil trials by 40 percent.

Deadlines set for the duration of the process

The cabinet in Rome took an important step on this path at the end of last week with the unanimous approval of Justice Minister Cartabia's reform package.

Among other things, the draft law stipulates that, in the event of corruption and abuse of public office, the recently abolished statute of limitations will not be formally reintroduced, but that deadlines will be set for the duration of the process.

Thereafter, a maximum of three years may elapse before the judgment in the second instance, after a further one and a half years must be judged in the third instance, otherwise the proceedings must be discontinued.

The deadline for preliminary investigations by the public prosecutor until the start of the proceedings is also significantly shortened. Many processes should be completed much faster by agreeing the parties on a reduced sentence and the waiver of legal remedies. To reduce the backlog of five million pending cases, thousands of new jobs are to be created in the judiciary.

In the penultimate week of July, the Chamber of Deputies is to debate the draft law for the first time. We aim to pass it by the end of the month. But there is resistance in the Five Star Movement, led by former Prime Minister Conte. He warns of a reintroduction of the limitation period for corruption offenses through the back door and calls for the bill to be rejected. Without broad approval of the factions of the quarreling five-star movement in both chambers of parliament, the judicial reform has no chance.