Italy's most difficult reform.

Column by Francesco Grillo published on the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero.

It was an electrical system that ended up in court to change one of my friend’s mind, who eight years ago tried to return to Italy to do business using tax benefits of one of the many “brain recovery” laws by which different governments tried to attract talents (and ending up capturing even footballers).

To make his newly rented office in the center of Rome habitable, he chose a type of electrical system whose cost was near to the rent discount cost granted by the owner. After a year the landlord demanded instead that the system should have been changed into one twice as expensive. A divergence of opinion to settle which a traffic policeman should have been enough, became a first instance trial lasted three years. The appeal was scheduled for the end of May 2022 but it was postponed to November 2024. Eight years after the first subpoena and in a moment when we should see the effects of the most desired reform by Mario Draghi:

by the end of 2024 the pendent disputes should be reduced by 65% in first instance judgment and by 55% in appeal, compared to 2019’s values; by mid-2026 the average duration of a civil trial should be reduced by 40% compared to the current situation in which Italy is, as the graph says, really behind as against any other advanced country.

The goal we promised to the European Commission as a condition for accessing the 200 billionof the RRP are very important one. However, the distance between the promises that we intend to achieve in three year and today reality in Italians courts requires a close vigilance to prevent, for the umpteenth time, so much promise and so little delivery.

The November 2021 bill that the Parliament used to delegate the government to implement the reform of the civil trial, seems to point to a realistic modernization through three levers.

Firstly, there is a strong reduction in the number of cases dealt with by the courts. This would be done both through a strengthening of incentives - for lawyers and citizens - to mediate before recourse to the court and with the strengthening of screens that allow the judge himself to interrupt in advance or to not admit to other degree of judgments requests “manifestly unfounded” or appeals that “do not have a reasonable chance of being accepted”.

Secondly, there is a request addressed to the Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione) to become once again the guarantor of uniform interpretations of the law (what is called "regulatory competence"), in order to reduce creativity (and complexity) to which judges are forced to face uncertain jurisprudence.

Finally, the trend is to use technologies to support the application of rules that become - as a result of the changes just mentioned - less uncertain and to remove some of the complications (for example the service of documents to the parties involved) who are very responsible for the long timeframe of justice. Practically in the very near future there would be fewer trials; more robot-run cases that we should train; more support staff and a better architecture to which the RRP allocated investments; faster bur less unpredictable sentences. A mistake that, perhaps, the RRP makes is to insist only on the speed factor, because, in reality, the reform would also produce more “fair” outcomes (as predictability is one of the distinctive aspects). But ...

Are four years enough to free us from one of the oldest "dark evils" of Italian society and economy?

Two issues remain unsolved and perhaps it’s because these concerns require for the investment of a political capital that not even Mario Draghi has at his disposal. A fairer justice requires the Parliament itself to legislate better and less. Although it is fair to ask the Supreme Court to standardize the judgments and the Artificial Intelligence to do the work that men do with much more struggle (in the offices of the so-called "maximal"), a weak legislator risks causing difficulties even to the most sophisticated scholars. Secondly, the reform lacks the most difficult and important piece: finding a way to strengthen the independence of the judiciary, increasing its accountability to the citizens.

For some times now there are visionary and pragmatic proposals that lead, at least, to the different assessment that several courts deserve, and to give a supporting role to managers who should support the judges and then together they can take charge of the improvement that the judicial system promises to the European Commission. Italian justice does not change with referendums abrogating individual provisions. Even if certain referendums can give signals.

The winning strategy, on the other hand, must succeed in bringing together issues that are considered to be opposed: the speed of a sentence and its reasonableness; the reduction of litigations which may coincide with an increase in access to justice for all; the human rights that Italian courts too often violate (as the European Court says) and the reasons for an economy that can no longer afford to lose even one talent.

Everything has been reduced to an electrical system that has become a process that lasts eight years. Small episodes that multiplied endlessly have torn a pact between the State and citizens, a pact that absolutely must be refunded. That if we believe in an Italian company capable of relaunching itself beyond a crisis that has lasted for twenty years, beyond the contradictions that we’ve never been able to undo.