Prison decree, final green light from the Chamber. There is a clash over immunity. Nordio: pretrial detention changes

ROME — Between the government’s short circuit and the institutional snub. The Chamber of Deputies is voting on the Prisons decree, but the Minister of Justice Charles Nordio he is not on the executive benches. He is at Palazzo Chigi with the Prime Minister Georgia Meloni to discuss penitentiary institutions and how to change the rules on pre-trial detention. With them are the ministers Antonio Tajani e Giancarlo Giorgettithe Undersecretary to the Presidency of the Council Alfredo Mantovano and all the representatives of the majority who deal with justice.

Something is wrong if, at the moment in which a measure is about to become law, a super summit is called to discuss the very rules that are about to receive the final green light. The version provided by the participants in the meeting speaks of the need for a point on the next “steps to take” to address the prison emergency which “remains a priority”. It sounds a bit like an admission of guilt, since the text in question does very little, if at all, to ease the burden on overcrowded penitentiaries, which in just over seven months have seen 66 suicides. The last one yesterday in Prato. For this reason the secretary of the Democratic Party Elly Schlein speaks of the “punitive fury of the majority that also sunk our proposal on mothers in prison”, on which the Chamber clashed when the Lega member Simonetta Matone she asked whether it is “better to stay inside the subway stealing, in the seventh month of pregnancy, or in a center.”

The fact is that the Prison Decree has become the container of other political needs. Like, to use the words of the opposition, the “criminal shield” for white-collar workers, a change in the regime of pre-trial detention, inserted in the form of an order of the day presented by the deputy of Azione Enrico Costa and that the government has made its own. In the reformulated and softer version compared to the original text, it commits the executive to evaluate “in the wake of the initiatives already adopted with the Nordio bill, a regulatory intervention aimed at a remodulation of the rules on precautionary custody with particular reference to precautionary needs aimed at a precise balance between the presumption of innocence and guarantees of security”. And the name of Giovanni Toti, the former governor of Liguria reached last May by a precautionary measure while he was in Sanremo, resounds several times in the Chamber.

In the emptiness of the government benches, the opposition stigmatizes the scene. The leader of the Democratic Party Chiara Braga takes the floor and accuses: «While we were voting, Minister Nordio was proposing other solutions to Meloni. It was obviously just propaganda».

In the meantime, the Minister of Justice has announced that he “has proposed to Meloni short and medium-term solutions for prison overcrowding”. Solutions that are clearly not present in the approved decree. And “on this issue I will ask for a meeting with the President of the Republic – says the head of Via Arenula – who has always shown great attention to the matter”. Furthermore, Nordio wants to propose to the Superior Council to increase the staff coverage for the surveillance magistracy and to provide that drug-addicted prisoners serve their sentences in communities. And this step is linked to the desire, in the wake of the government order presented by Costa and supported by the majority, to modify the law on pre-trial detention, “necessary – he says – to avoid unjustified imprisonment, but above all to affirm the differentiated detention of drug addicts in recovery communities”. Therefore, he asks for the help of the opposition.

But it is just another provocation. The opposition denounces a “humiliated” Parliament and calls into question the President of the Chamber Lorenzo Fontana to define “a remedial action” by the Minister of Justice. Pd, M5S, Iv, Avs and +Europa ask that Nordio immediately report to the Chamber the contents of the Palazzo Chigi summit. The parliamentarians of the majority respond and the third highest office of the State is forced to intervene to reiterate “the centrality of Parliament, whose prerogatives must be guaranteed through the comparison of ideas and the assumption of responsibilities by all interested parties”. The opposition appreciates it, but in the meantime another government blitz has been completed before the summer break.