La justice est une espèce de marthyre (Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, 17th century French theologian and preacher)
The Notepad of Michael the Great
“Magistrates do well when they are prosecutors as prosecutors and not policemen or judges; when they are judges and not prosecutors or policemen; when they remain independent and also avoid not appearing it; when they respect the other powers of the state and do not seek pseudo-judicial ways to questionable political reforms; when they defend their independence but do not disguise their corporate interests as independence; when they act on facts and not on theorems ”(Francesco Cossiga).
“The prosecutor must not have any kind of kinship with the judge and must not be, as he is today, a kind of adjudicator. Those who, like me, request that (judge and prosecutor) be, on the other hand, two structurally different figures in skills and career, are branded as an enemy of the independence of the magistrate, a nostalgic for the discretion of criminal action, eager to place the prosecutor under the control of the Executive "(Giovanni Falcone).
****
How many judicial errors are there in Italy? Benedetto Lattanzi and Valentino Maimone, authors of Errorigiudiziari.com, the first extremely precious archive on unjust detention, have been asking for it for over 25 years. The Report, updated as of December 31, 2020 and published a few days ago, specifies that there is a difference between the victims of unjust detention (i.e. those who undergo pre-trial detention in prison or under house arrest, only to be acquitted), and who suffers a judicial error (i.e. who, after being convicted with a final sentence, is acquitted following a review process).
However, “to get a first idea of how many judicial errors there are in Italy, it is worth putting together both the victims of unjust detention and those of judicial errors in the strict sense. Well, from 1991 to 31 December 2020 there were 29,659 cases: on average, just over 988 a year. All this for a gigantic total expenditure of the State, including indemnities and compensation itself: 869,754,850 euros and small change, for an average of just over 28 million and 990 thousand euros a year ”.
The overwhelming majority is represented by those who ended up in pre-trial detention as innocent: “From 1992 to 31 December 2020, there were 29,452 cases: on average, 1,015 innocents in pre-trial detention each year. All for an expense that exceeds 794 million and 771 thousand euros in compensation, for an average of just over 27,405,915 euros per year ”. In 2020, there were 750 cases of unjust detention, for a total expense in compensation of € 36,958,648.64.
"Compared to the previous year, there is a sharp decline in both the number of cases (-250) and expenditure", writes Judicial Errors. How can this evident decline be explained? "It is very likely that it was due to Covid, which severely slowed down the judicial activity at all levels, therefore presumably also at that of the Courts of Appeal in charge of dealing with the requests for reparation for unjust detention". On the other hand, as regards judicial errors in the strict sense, the total is 207, starting from 1991. The expenditure in compensation is 74,983,300.01 euros (equal to an average of almost 2 million and 500 thousand euros per year). In 2020 alone, from January to December, judicial errors were 16: 4 fewer than the previous year.
****
With the age requirement of 67 (blocked until 2024), Italy is at the top of the European ranking by legal age required for old-age retirement. In fact, as underlined by a paper of Social Security Itineraries signed by Michaela Camilleri, the reforms implemented in the last thirty years, raising the retirement age, have tried both to remedy some glaring anomalies (baby pensions, early retirement) that allowed for retire with excessively favorable conditions (think, for example, of the famous 14 years 6 months and one day of public employees), and to cope with the effects of an aging population. So much so that the adjustment of the retirement age to life expectancy, together with the periodic revision of the transformation coefficients, represents one of the automatic stabilizers to guarantee the sustainability of the pension system.
Having set the legal bar so high, at what age do we actuallyretire ? Sifting through the OECD data, we discover that, contrary to what the unions and Salvini's tour company claim, our country does not boast any international record for effective retirement age: between 2013 and 2018, Italian workers went retired at an effective average age of 61 years and 5 months, against an OECD average of 63 years and 7 months, ranking behind Germany and the United Kingdom (63.6); in the same period, men recorded an effective average age of 63 years and 3 months, compared to an OECD average of 65 years and 4 months, moving Italy even further down the rankings.
This is because, in addition to old age, our system provides a second channel of access to retirement, namely early retirement, whose contribution requirements are blocked at 42 years and 10 months for men and 41 years and 10 months for women until 2026. Furthermore, without considering the introduction of a series of additional measures that make it possible to anticipate retirement with respect to the retirement age: woman option, social Ape, isopension or redundancy allowance, thanks to which the worker can retire with seven years in advance with the contribution to the expenses of the company of which he is employed. In short, a lot of noise for nothing (or almost).
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/la-justice-est-une-espece-de-marthyre-jacques-benigne-bossuet-teologo-e-predicatore-francese-del-seicento-2/ on Sat, 26 Feb 2022 06:35:24 +0000.