Palamara case, the Constitutional Court: “The Chamber could not deny the use of Ferri’s wiretaps”

The Constitutional Court accepted the conflict of attributions raised by the Superior Council of the Judiciary in the context of the disciplinary proceedings against Cosimo Ferri. Consequently, he annulled the resolution with which, last January 12, the Chamber of Deputies denied the disciplinary section of the CSM the authorization to use the catchments involving Ferri, off-duty magistrate, who held a parliamentary mandate for several years. The wiretaps referred to the meeting at the Champagne hotel in Rome on 9 January 2019 in which the parliamentarian discussed the appointment of the Rome prosecutor with professional members of the CSM, fellow deputy Luca Lotti and Luca Palamara.

The Constitutional Court established that the use of interceptions did not require prior authorization, as instead claimed by the Chamber of Deputies (pursuant to article 4 of law 140/2003), as it did not appear that the investigation activity “was unequivocally aimed at intercepting communications from Mr Ferri as well”. For having denied the authorization on the assumption of the absence of a prior authorization, which in reality is not necessary, without instead ruling on the subsequent authorization request (pursuant to article 6 of law 140/2003, the Chamber of Deputies has therefore, according to the Consulta, “exercised attributions due to it in the abstract, but, in concrete terms, going beyond its limits”.

The Court therefore ruled that “the request for authorization made by the disciplinary section requires a new assessment by the Chamber of Deputies itselfof the existence of the conditions to which the use of the interceptions carried out in a different proceeding is conditioned”.