This is how bureaucratic language invades Parliament: so many acronyms and too much English, good Italian does not dictate the law

Not only does the use of English in legislative texts come to a halt: the red light also goes out for the wording of provisions that are "too concise or colloquial" and "the unnecessary and non-uniform use of acronyms, technical-jargon expressions and sometimes elliptical formulae". It is the Senate Committee for Legislation that, in its six-monthly report on the activity carried out in the period between January and June 2024, points out that it has censured the frequent recourse to forms of writing of legislative measures being examined by the Chambers that are not compatible with the criteria of simplicity and clarity. In other words, the government and the parliamentarians themselves are being asked to put an end to the phenomenon of overly complex, poorly written bills or DLs, and for this reason sometimes incomprehensible, and with definitions that sometimes contradict each other in the distance of a few rules or paragraphs.

Also in the Committee's sights are the executive's excessive recourse to urgent decrees, often in a distorted manner with omnibus decrees and with regulations that do not meet the requirements of necessity and urgency, and the government's delay in sending the Air (regulatory impact analysis) and the Atn (technical regulatory analysis) to Parliament, especially in connection with bills for the conversion of decrees.

But one of the issues on which the Committee's observations and even recommendations have focused repeatedly over the months is that of the 'technical wording of the legislative act', highlighting in particular 'the failure to respect the principles for drafting legislative texts'. In this regard, the body in Palazzo Madama (as well as its twin body in Montecitorio) has called for 'the correct use of partitions in the legislative act and the appropriate, complete and uniform indication of internal and external regulatory references'. Not only: the Committee has repeatedly censured 'imprecise and colloquial or excessively concise wording of headings'.

What comes under the lens, however, is above all the complexity and confusion that emerges from the texts. Hence the solicitation to respect the 'principle according to which, in order to avoid misunderstandings or doubts of interpretation, it is appropriate that the same concepts and institutes be identified by identical names and that the concepts and institutes used in an act be the same as those used in previous legislative acts for the same cases'. But there are also other explicit invitations to the executive and deputy senators: 'to precision in the use of definitions' and 'to uniformity in the citation of regulatory and administrative acts'. Invitations that are accompanied by a request to put an end to the use of excessively synthetic or colloquial rules and technical jargon and acronyms. Last but not least, the Committee reiterated the need to 'replace formulations in English with expressions in Italian'.