After the intervention contained in the Nordio reform, which eliminates the crime of abuse of office, definitively approved yesterday by the Chamber, and which also contains the ban on listening to telephone conversations between the defense attorney and the defendant, the government is preparing to tackle the regulation of wiretapping as a whole.
The Minister of Justice himself explained: “We are working on a comprehensive reform of wiretapping to radically implement Article 15 of the Constitution, which indicates the secrecy of conversations as the other side of freedom”, said the Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio, questioned by reporters in Transatlantico. And the Undersecretary for Relations with Parliament, a member of Forza Italia, Matilde Siracusano, confirmed: “The Nordio bill includes a ban on publishing wiretaps of third parties, unrelated to investigations. In this country, unfortunately, the abuse of wiretapping has become an ordinary problem, and in fact the minister is working on a comprehensive reform aimed precisely at avoiding abuse”.
Meanwhile, it is at the parliamentary level that the first next moves will be made: in the Senate, Forza Italia is pushing for a quick examination of the texts with Zanettin as the first signatory.
Transformed into an amendment to the approved Nordio bill, the majority has already intervened on the prohibition of “seizure and any form of control of communications in any way recognizable as occurring between the suspect and his lawyer, unless the judicial authority has reasonable grounds to believe that it is the corpus delicti.Communication is presumed to occur between the defendant and the defense attorney in all cases in which it is carried out on telephone lines attributable to them”.
The other text branded FI has already received the first approval from the Senate and must be examined by the Chamber. It focuses on the issue of the seizure of smartphones and digital devices: Article 254-bis is inserted into the Code of Criminal Procedure, which provides that the judicial authority can proceed with the seizure by means of a reasoned decree that expressly indicates: a) the reasons that make the seizure necessary in relation to the connection of relevance between the asset seized and the object of the investigation; b) the technical operations to be carried out on the asset seized and the criteria that will be used to select, in compliance with the principle of proportion, only the data actually necessary for the continuation of the investigations. In the event that there is a risk that the content of the devices could be deleted, altered or modified, the judicial authority adopts the technical measures and issues the necessary prescriptions to ensure their conservation and to prevent anyone from analyzing and examining them until the completion, in cross-examination with the interested parties, of the data selection operations”.
Finally, the Azzurri are pushing for a quick examination of the text that aims to set a basic limit of 45 days to the extension of wiretapping, with the exception of mafia and terrorism crimes.
The text has already been approved by the Justice Commission of Palazzo Madama and now it will have to be scheduled in the Chamber. The leader of the blue group yesterday explained that he had asked for an acceleration. In essence, the bill modifies article 267 of the code of criminal procedure and prohibits wiretapping for more than 45 days. At the moment, however, wiretapping can be extended without limits by the investigating judge at the request of the public prosecutor.