Justice

Abuse of office, the rush to expunge convictions: the implications of the Nordio law

The Nordio law allows public officials to cancel convictions for abuse of office. The impact and consequences of this decision.

by Giovanni Negri

25 August 2024

2' min read

Key points

Approximately 4 thousand public officials affected.
The new peculation by diversion

2' min read

With the entry into force of the Nordio law, the race is on for public officials to have their final convictions for abuse of office cancelled.

Faced with the deletion of the most classic offence against public administrators, undoubtedly the emblematic provision of Law 114, it is clear that many people who have been definitively sanctioned, as always happens in cases of abolitio criminis or drastic downsizing of criminal relevance (just think of what happened a few years ago on false accounting when, with the introduction of the thresholds, the offence was drastically circumscribed), will apply to have their conviction deleted from their criminal record.

Approximately 4 thousand public officials affected

According to the ANM, which has contested what appears to be an out-and-out 'amnesty', there are approximately 4,000 public officials affected. Research by Gian Luigi Gatta, Professor of Criminal Law at the Milan State University, has highlighted how, according to criminal records data, updated to May 2022, relating to final sentences from 1997 to 2020, more than 3,600 convictions have been entered. There were 546 in 1997; they have gradually decreased to 40 in 2021.

If the explosion of requests for the elimination of convictions received is an obvious certainty, as is the archiving of all pending proceedings, with judicial offices already suspending judgments in the past weeks pending the entry into force of the law, the impact of the repeal of abuse of office from today will instead be measured from several points of view.

We recall three of them. To be verified, in fact, will be whether the creative capacity of the public prosecutor's offices, by favouring the expansion of other crimes, will try to compensate for what the entire judiciary, for once united, considers a drastic lowering of the protections available to citizens. An expansion that could lead to the paradoxical effect of making crimes with more serious penalties such as bribery or extortion applicable instead of the old and now shelved abuse. Also to avert this, for now only possible fallout, the majority is reasoning on a possible overall reform of crimes against the public administration.

The new peculation by diversion

The second unknown factor concerns the incisiveness of the new peculation by misappropriation, which the Ministry of Justice was forced to introduce in haste, in the Prisons Decree, to plug the absence of full criminal protection on the misappropriation of public money. Finally, there is the whole profile of tension with international sources, starting with the draft anti-corruption directive, which could soon lead the majority decision before the Constitutional Court. In the initial outline of the directive, in fact, a robust penal protection to sanction conduct attributable to the now disappeared abuse of office is considered essential by the Commission.

In recent weeks, however, the Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio , has claimed to have found a new balance in the European context, with the recognition of the plurality of offences that, on the whole, Italian legislation can count against corruption.