Without cross-examination, the police commissioner cannot admonish the accused of stalking

The admonition of the Questore issued within the framework of the stalking preventionprocedure, and adoptedwithout cross-examination, damages the family and private social life of the accused person. TheEuropean Court of Human Rights has condemned Italy forviolating Article 8 of the Convention guaranteeing the right to respect for private life and for taking the police measure against a man without first hearing his reasons and putting him in a position to participate in the decision on the measure taken against him, so as to assert his interests.

A warning for persecutory acts, adopted by the Questore of Rome in 2015, had ended up in the Eurojusts' sights. In upholding the appeal of the addressee of the measure, the Strasbourg judges stated that the man "was not heard by the Questore before the latter adopted the measure and that consequently he did not have the opportunity to put forward arguments in support of his position". The Court also notes that the record of the warning did not indicate the circumstances that would have made an urgent measure necessary.

According to the ECHR, from the acts 'it appears that the Questore did not duly justify his decision' and that the prefect, the TAR and the Council of State did not carry out an independent examination of the existence of an imminent risk or other reasons justifying an exception to the man's right to be heard. With regard to the claim that 'the grounds of urgency clearly emerge from the measure in question, in so far as it refers to the man's proven, repeated and continuous cpersecutory behaviour', the Court considers that it is very general and is not based on any factual evidence to support it. Moreover, the Court observes "that the fact that the warning was notified only about two months after the victim's appeal to the Questore, and that the notification took more than three weeks, is sufficient to refute the argument of the national authorities and the Government about the urgency of the measure".

The European Court of Human Rights had also expressed itself on this issue in 2023, emphasising, even on that occasion, that acts affecting human rights must be subject to some form of adversarial proceedings before an independent body competent to review the reasons for the decision and the relevant evidence. The recipient must be able to challenge the claims of the authorities, because in the absence of such guarantees, the police or state bodies could arbitrarily violate the rights protected by the Convention.

It was a decision that was already the subject of criticism by legal practitioners at the time, due to the risk - given the delicacy of the matter and the need to adopt timely preventive measures - of taking steps backwards in combating gender-based violence. A violence that knows no stopping.