Nordio closes to the return of abuse of office

It is a no-no without appeal to any hypothesis of the reintroduction of abuse of office that expressed by Justice Minister Carlo Nordio, answering the question time yesterday afternoon in the Chamber of Deputies. Not even the controversial rule contained in the new anti-corruption directive, finally approved on Tuesday by the Council of the European Union, moves the minister. While that rule imposes an obligation to incriminate the "unlawful exercise of public functions", there is no longer an explicit reference to abuse of office in the text, after Italy's requests for reformulation, which were accepted, during the drafting phase of the directive.

And for Nordio, to rule out the need for new interventions after 'his' law cancelled the crime and the Constitutional Court ruled unfounded the questions ofconstitutional legitimacy raised by numerous judicial offices, there is the very varied anti-corruption arsenal available in Italia's criminal law: "We even have offences that other states do not know about: I am thinking, for example, of concussion by induction, which is very difficult to explain to foreigners because they do not even know what it is; we have corruption proper and improper, antecedent and subsequent; we have concussion by duress; we also have, as you know, thetender fraud. In short, we have no less than 17 articles that constitute the regulatory arsenal against corruption with which Europe has expressed its satisfaction'.

With regard to the directive Nordio emphasises that 'Article 7 does not typify any incriminating case, it does not identify specific conduct, while, on the contrary, the offence of abuse of office was repealed because out of a thousand hypotheses of criminal offences, no more than 1 or 2 per cent were convicted, and it was abolished precisely because it lacked the characteristics of typicality, the principle of legality and also the principle of protection of the protected good'.

And then the ministry vindicates the expression 'modest bribes' used on several occasions: 'I would like to remind you that the concept of tenuity or modesty is included in our legal system. We speak of tenuity of the fact even to exclude the punishability of an offence; we speak of modest amounts in the possession of drugs and in the mitigating circumstances there are the particular requirements of lightness, of tenuity of the fact'.

The question time then allows Nordio to relaunch the bill already approved in the Senate and now stalled for weeks in the Chamber (but from Forza Italia there are calls for a resumption of the discussion) on the new procedure ofseizure of electronic devices and smartphones: 'It is intolerable that Article 15 of the Constitution, which protects the secrecy and freedom of conversations, should be violated without the intervention of a judicial body.