Nordio’s race to change between announcements and contradictions – Corriere.it

If Meloni calls, Nordio answers. Raising the concerns of the judiciary and presumably also the tone of the conflict with his former colleagues. As if by reflex, the press release issued the other evening by Palazzo Chigi against the robes which oppose the government with their decisions is followed by yesterday morning’s release by the ministry in via Arenula on the “unreasonable forced charge” of which the Undersecretary of Justice Andrea Delmastro Delle Vedove fell victim. With the same anonymous formula but not too much of the “ministerial sources”, the former magistrate who entered politics and the executive under the insignia of the Brothers of Italy argues that the decision of the Rome judge to impose on the Prosecutor’s Office the request for referral to judgment for the undersecretary accused of breach of secrecy “demonstrates the irrationality of our system.”

According to Carlo Nordio, “in the process that follows, the prosecution will only insist on the request for acquittal in line with the request for dismissal, and if on the contrary it will ask for a conviction, it will only contradict itself”. So one is needed “radical reform” because “in the accusatory trial the prosecutor is the monopolist of the criminal action, and therefore rationally it cannot be denied by a judge on the basis of elements which the accuser himself does not believe”.

So here it isannouncement of another change to the Criminal Procedure Code, in the wake of a new political-judicial case. As in the times of the laws ad personam, one might say. But this time with a surplus of apparent contradiction if only one considers that the workhorse of the government and the majority remains the separation of careers between judges and prosecutors, opposed by all magistrates but demanded and pursued by the center-right to avoid any form of connection and risk of flattening between those who accuse a defendant and whoever decides his fate. To the point that the responsible Justice of Action Enrico Costa, one of the most pugnacious supporters of the impartiality of the judge and usually deployed on these issues alongside the majority even from the benches of the opposition, this time does not understand and distances himself: «Protest if a judge denies a prosecutor contradicts the principles of due process that Nordio recalls every day».

The same “ministerial sources” made themselves heard early in the morning (probably due to the time difference with Tokyo, where Nordio is to meet his G7 colleagues) also on the Santanchè case, noting “the bewilderment and unease for the yet another press release of an act that should remain confidential”. That is the
guarantee information to the Minister of Tourism under investigation for false accounting
. And the Keeper of the Seals reiterates that his reform project just approved by the government “aims to eliminate this anomaly, protecting the honor of every presumed innocent citizen until definitive conviction”.

But even here there is a problem. Until yesterday, as far as communicated by the interested party, Santanchè has not received notices, and therefore the changes introduced by Nordio (summary description of the contested fact, notification by means of the judicial police only in cases of urgency, prohibition of publication until the end of the preliminary investigations) would have had no impact on his affair. The media discovered last November lentry in the register of suspects through the filing of other documents that are no longer secret, and if the minister had wanted she too could have known officially that she was being investigated, at least since last February.

It remains to be understood what the Minister of Justice intends to do concretely, beyond the half-anonymous declarations following those of the premier. The technical offices of the ministry, for now, have not received input for further legislative interventions, but it is possible that during the parliamentary discussion of the reform just finalized both the government and the majority parties insert new and more restrictive changes. Provoking, in addition to the bewilderment of the sentences coming from Palazzo Chigi and via Arenula, the predictable criticisms of the robe. Synthesized like this from Eugenio Albamonteformer president of the National Association of Magistrates and leader of the “judicial left” of Area: “Reacting with continuous announcements of reform to every single and contingent procedural situation, without a minimal system logic, is a very unserious way of being a minister of Justice”.

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