Justice bill, the draft: from abuse of office to wiretapping

The crackdown on wiretapping arrives in the CDM. This is foreseen in the draft of the justice reform which will go on the table at the government meeting tomorrow. The issue of “copies of interceptions whose publication is forbidden” will be excluded, when “the request is presented by a person other than the parties and their defenders”, the “obligation of the public prosecutor to supervise the methods of drafting of the minutes of the operations (so-called drafts) and, respectively, the duty of the judge to “extract” the interceptions, including – in addition to the already envisaged “sensitive personal data” – also those “relating to subjects other than the parties”. The article which currently prohibits the publication of the content of the interceptions is amended until they have been «acquired pursuant to articles 268, 415-bis or 454» this limitation «is now made more stringent by providing that the ban on publication falls only when the intercepted content is “reproduced by the judge in the motivation of a provision or used during the hearing”. The aim – reads the draft – is “to strengthen the protection of the third party unrelated to the proceeding with respect to the circulation of intercepted communications”.
Precautionary measures
Collegiality «is envisaged only in the investigation phase; it is not envisaged when the measure is adopted as part of the arrest or detention validation procedures; it is also extended to aggravation pronouncements involving the application of the measure whose adoption is ordinarily collegial, as well as to the provisional application of prison security measures”. This provision will enter into force in 2 years while waiting for “with specific spending authorizations” to proceed with “an increase in the organic role of the judiciary to the extent of 250 units, to be allocated to first instance judicial functions”.
Warranty information
«Although placed to protect the person under investigation, the guarantee information has often turned into the exposure of the suspect to media notoriety, with stigmatizing effects”. This is what we read in the explanatory report of the justice reform that will arrive on the table of tomorrow’s Council of Ministers. «The intervention – we read – has the aim, on the one hand, of enriching the function of guaranteeing information, specifying that it must contain a “summary description of the fact”, which is not foreseen today; on the other, to establish that the notification takes place in a manner that protects the suspect from any improper consequence. For this second aspect, in reiterating the general rule according to which the delivery of the document, even when carried out to a person other than the addressee, must be carried out in such a way as to guarantee the confidentiality of the latter, the possibility of using the police has been limited judiciary only to urgent situations that do not allow recourse to the ordinary procedures”.