In the enabling act about interceptions, contained in the Orlando legal reform, the Parliament has drawn some well-structured legislative parameters in order to protect privacy in the best possible way. These parameters are inspired on the guidelines made by the public prosecutors’ offices. The cross-reference to the enabling act and the circulars allows to highlight some of the main issues. The lawmaker has to take care of these problems in order to avoid inconsistencies and constitutional doubts. In particular, the choice to entrust to the public prosecutor (and, firstly, to the police) the selection of conversations to record can penalize the defensive needs; moreover, this choice, without trial sanctions, can make the need to protect privacy useless. After the dialogue between the public prosecutor and the police, the recorded and cutted off conversations could remain; their potential and unlawful publication lacks of a suitable sanction.
The Joint Chambers, with the famous judgements Dasgupta and Patalano, require the renewal of the trial evidentiary hearing in appeal to overturn the acquittal in conviction. The case law of the European Court of Human Rights in on the background. The “Orlando Reform” of criminal justice is on the horizon, becoming the legislative translation of this innovative jurisprudence.
Apparently, this time, we will have to say goodbye to the criminal appeal as configured in the Vassalli Code. The “Orlando Reform” is now moving rapidly to its approval, and among the (several, heterogeneous) innovations, there are also provisions that may seriously alter the features of the second-degree judgment. The strategic design pursues an ambitious aim: to obtain the full compliance with the ECHR and to decongest the Courts at the same time. The result - which highlights a (not surprising, actually) continuum between legislator and cassation - is, however, quite disappointing overall. The erroneous premises, regarding Strasbourg rulings and the nature and function of the appeal, lead to contestable solutions: on the one hand, the judgment is burdened without any improvement of its quality; on the other, the appeal accessibility becomes more difficult due to the stricter eligibility conditions.
The paper provides a first illustration of the novelties introduced by Law No. 103 of 2017, and highlights merits and flaws of a reform that often contains a mere legislative trasposition of recent case law.
This article examines the fundamental characteristics of the comprehensive reform of criminal law proposed by Minister Orlando and currently under examination at the Senate. This reform should have an impact on many institutions of substantive criminal law – e.g., the extinguishment of a crime due to preparatory conducts and especially the statute of limitations for a crime – as well as on a number of procedural criminal law standards, which share the aim to make procedural developments more effective, even by means of a stricter deadline system for the different turning points.