Barbera: if the legislature remains inert on end-of-life and gay couples, the Court will intervene

If the legislature's inertia on the end of life and on the children of gay couples continues, the Constitutional Court cannot fail to intervene. This is the warning addressed to the Government by the President of the Constitutional Court, Professor Augusto Antonio Barbera, in his report during the extraordinary meeting of the Constitutional Court on the Court's activities in the presence of the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, held in 2023. The invitation addressed to the legislator is to follow up sentence no. 242 of 2019, on the end of life, with the principles affirmed in relation to the Cappato case. For the umpteenth time (it had already happened in 2021, with sentences 32 and 33), an intervention regulating the registry status of children of same-sex couples is also called for. Two cases in which the Constitutional Court's warnings went unheeded, leading, 'in the first case, to numerous substitutions by the regional assemblies; in the second, to the haphazard and contradictory intervention of the mayors in charge of the registry office registers'.

For Barbera, it is also necessary to take into account popular sensitivity on these issues. 'On the end of life,' said the president of the Consulta, 'the regions are multiplying initiatives to replace Parliament, which has not intervened. I cannot absolutely anticipate a judgement. But I emphasise one point: the fact that we have involved Parliament in the regulation of the end of life, it is not as has sometimes been said that we intend to stop and say now it is the Parliament's task. No, we are calling on Parliament to collaborate,' he continued, 'in the identification of parameters that refer to values and that are readings that cannot be ascertained through reasoning of interests alone, but require a reading that must also be supplemented by the opinion and will of the assemblies expressive of the will of the people... It being understood,' the president concluded, 'that if inertia remains, the Court cannot but intervene.

In his report on the activity of the judge of laws, Barbera does not forget the dramatic data on feminicides and those on deaths at work '2023 was also the year that saw atrocious cases of feminicide in Italy, or recorded, in any case, numerous and repugnant acts of violence against women. And it was the year in which over a thousand (an average of no less than three a day!) chilling deaths at work took place'. In the presence of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, Barbera assured the Court's commitment on these fronts 'Tragedies that, directly or indirectly, have seen and will see the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court engaged, both with regard to the condition of women and with regard to important aspects of the organisation of work in companies'.

Finally, the president reassured on the absence of risks for the independence of the Consulta 'The Constitutional Court is not at risk of being undermined by contingent political events, both because of the diversification of the channels of access, and in light of the large majority required for the election of judges of parliamentary extraction, and the prohibition on re-election. This is unlike the composition of other European courts, which are sometimes improperly compared to the Italian court'.