Prescription, the FdI-FI-Azione axis wants to beat Nordio on time, M5S on the barricades

ROME – “En attendant” Nordio. It can be titled like this piece which for two weeks has been on the air in the Justice Committee of the House on the prescription. With the nightmare that ends up as with the abuse of office. Where the Keeper of the Seals Charles Nordio he let the deputies “play”, to then block them with a halt before the last goal. From the series: I’m the minister, and I make the laws. And not you. And so, after wasting two months listening to the world about the abuse of office, the Justice Commission has seen the whole file slip by, which is now passing to the Senate together with the Nordio bill. Which erases the abuse from the penal code. The Nordio “norm”, in fact.

The same scenario is now looming on the prescription. Two weeks of hearings, renowned jurists, Italy’s most well-known prosecutors, the president of the ANM Santalucia, the European deputy prosecutor Ceccarelli, a barrage of opinions all against the hypothesis of changing the rules on limitation again, returning to the law Orlando of 2017, and perhaps also maintaining the Cartabia law of 2021 on the inadmissibility.

A very tasty morsel for insiders who are now talking to each other from the rostrum of newspapers and legal reviews. Prescription is a topic that has always fascinated me. There is no jurist who does not measure himself on the most suitable formula. And in these hours the problem is whether, in order, the law can be changed again after having already changed it two years ago, whether Orlando’s prescription and Cartabia’s non-admissibility can go together, or whether one must choose favoring only the Orlando law, which, for those who don’t remember, establishes a suspension of 18 months on appeal and 18 on Cassation for those who lost the trial in the first instance.

Can this prescription go hand in hand with the non-proceedability of Cartabia, which instead imposes rigid times in the Appeals and causes the processes to be dropped if the permitted times are not respected (two years)? The jurists say no, like Nello RossiDirector of Justice questionthe magazine of the democratic judiciary, which sticks to who, how Henry Costa of Action and Cyrus Male of Fratelli d’Italia hypothesize the solution of the double track. For Rossi it is almost a blasphemy. Legal of course. And he tells the ‘lawyers paper’, the doubt.

And after last week’s one, the new hearings confirm an already known scenario. Here is the prosecutor of Palermo Maurice DeLucia say that Orlando’s statute of limitations and the non-admissibility cannot be held together. And then the Attorney General of the Cassation Louis Saved ready to remind politics that there are “other priorities” and among these there is certainly no prescription. From Luxembourg a stick also from Danilo CeccarelliEppo’s deputy prosecutor, who rejects the new proposals defining them “contrary to European Union law”, with a view to a prescription that “must be an exceptional tool, given that it is a huge waste of resources and a defeat of the state”.

Contrary opinions that certainly don’t make the three parties that authored the proposal to return to the Orlando law give up. So much so that Costa never fails to tease all the interlocutors who oppose his idea. The intention is to go ahead, write a basic text next week, and continue to discuss it. Certainly the prescription will not go to the courtroom by the end of July. We’ll talk about it again in September. But here the great unknown is the possible intervention of Nordio who has already said that, among his many intentions, there is also that of putting his hand on the prescription.

And then the prediction is that it will end just like the abuse of office, long discussions in the House, and then Nordio’s bill. That he has already announced, after the mini bill on the abuse of office and on the gag to the press that he will no longer be able to write about wiretaps reporting the content, that he will intervene on crimes of the public administration. An obligatory step for him, given that he has made a pact with the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Commission Julia Bongiorno, in exchange for her green light to cancel the abuse of office, which will have her own bill in hand. If Nordio fails to meet its commitments, Bongiorno would have an easy hand in slowing down the progress of the first Nordio bill on justice. Moreover, he arrived after a good seven months in government, and is currently still on his way to Palazzo Madama due to the failure to cover the costs for hiring 250 new judges.

But what should we expect on the prescription? Certainly the deep anger of the grillini. What all the deputies of the Justice Commission declared yesterday, starting with the former national anti-mafia prosecutor Federico Cafiero De Raho – that the objective of the bill on the prescription is “only to wreck the processes”. The M5S squares on the Bonafede law which blocked the prescription after the first instance trial. Law to which Cartabia, while maintaining it, has changed its nature, attaching a “procedural” prescription to contain the duration of the process. In this tangle, the most passionate are the jurists who once again, in the last fifty years, can discuss the most appetizing topic, that of prescription. If Berlusconi were still alive, his solution would be in sight: shorten the fall time of the crime in order to kill the processes as soon as possible. That is, a new Cirielli law after the one, still in force, of 2005.