Undue receipt of citizenship income: 2 to 7 years imprisonment

The severe, especially in the minimum, punishment provided for violating the rules on citizenship income holds up. The measure, Article 7 paragraph 1 of Decree-Law No. 4 of 2019, which punishes with detention from two to seven years anyone who, in order to unduly obtain the benefit, makes or uses false declarations or documents or certifies falsehoods or omits due information, passes constitutionality scrutiny. This was affirmed by the Constitutional Court in sentence 35 filed yesterday, in which the questions raised by the single judge of Florence were rejected as unfounded.

The latter had denounced, on the one hand, the disproportionate nature of the punishment envisaged for the fraud on citizenship income, in particular with reference to the punishments envisaged for the crime ofundue receipt of disbursements to damage the State and for the aggravating circumstances of the crime of fraud. The referral order then emphasised that the offence can be committed even if the person would have been entitled to the income in any case, but to a lesser extent, thus ending up also affecting people who are in any case in a difficult situation.

The Constitutional Court, however, does not take this view and points out that the offence under discussion is not outlined in broad and indefinite terms, thus excluding from its scope of application 'hypotheses that are markedly dissimilar in terms of criminology and significantly differentiated in terms of their level of criminality. The conduct sanctioned are, in fact, strongly typified and present, therefore, a circumscribed latitude, as they relate to the specific procedure aimed at obtaining the benefit of the citizenship income and therefore the production or use of false declarations or documents or certifying things that are not true or the untruthful silence are to be placed in the restricted area of the requirements necessary for access to this measure".

The minimum of two years imprisonment, even if it constitutes a severe sanction, cannot in itself be considered unreasonably harsh and manifestly disproportionate. It can certainly be criticised, the ruling notes, on the level of criminal policy, but these are assessments that are extraneous to the assessment of constitutional legitimacy. The Court is called upon not to consider the goodness of the various possible regulatory solutions, with greater or lesser severity of the punitive treatment, but only to assess the possible unreasonableness of the choice.

And then, concludes the Consulta, the widespread number of recipients of the citizenship income constitutes an objective circumstance of greater detrimental capacity to the protected good, on the one hand, because the number of undue recipients of the citizenship income could have been wide, with a consequent greater exposure, in terms of diversion or incorrect allocation, of the available resources; on the other hand, because it could have represented a critical element for the controls on the possession of the requirements required by the measure, "the outcome of which would have occurred, and in fact did occur, at a distance of several time from the actual disbursement, and not due, of the benefit".