Latest statement from the judiciary; the CSM approves the guidelines

After a rather turbulent journey, the CSM’s guidelines have finally been finalised on communication by judicial offices. The plenary session on Wednesday 10 June approved the text by a majority (with four votes against and three abstentions), incorporating a series of amendments that had been painstakingly finalised. Vice-President Fabio Pinelli, in his speech, emphasised that ‘we must be obsessed with reputation rather than with external information. I believe we need to change our way of thinking, and the thrust of this resolution is precisely that. Let us restore reputation, and then we will deal with the right to be forgotten’.

As the explanatory report notes, the new text acknowledges that, ‘in the digital ecosystem’, a judicial news story published during the initial stages of an investigation can have reputational effects that are far more rapid and persistent than the subsequent judicial findings. ‘Hence the decision to state that institutional communication must not only respect the presumption of innocence, but also truthful, necessary, proportionate, rectifiable and up-to-date, so as to prevent the inevitable provisional nature of the investigative phase from resulting in an irreversible compromise of personal dignity”.

In line with this approach, particular emphasis is placed on the distinction between initial communication, reactive communication and update communication. Alongside the possibility of correcting inaccurate or distorted information , already present in the 2018 text, the requirement for a subsequent communication is introduced when developments in the proceedings or process significantly alter the picture originally presented by the office.

Updates will be provided in the event of cases being dropped, charges being withdrawn, cases being quashed, acquittals, acquittals or other outcomes differing from those at the initial stage aims to strengthen reputational protection: if the office considers it necessary to communicate a piece of news at an early stage of the proceedings, it may subsequently be required to rectify that same news when, as the proceedings unfold, the content and meaning change. ‘The criterion set out in the text is, on this point, that of timeliness, visibility and informational symmetry with respect to the initial communication’.

An amendment has been approved regarding this provision—one of the most innovative aspects of the new guidelines—which strikes a balance by avoiding ex officio intervention, which is envisaged only during the preliminary investigation stage, and instead requiring the person concerned to request the corrective notice.