Observatory on criminal and security legislation
In recent decades, Italian lawmakers have made extensive use of criminal justice, and although this is a topic of great interest and continually referred to in the literature, a systematic and complete reconstruction of all legislation in this area is lacking in the national panorama.
The Observatory on Criminal and Security Legislation aims to continue the work carried out as part of the PRIN PNRR project “The determinants of urban security policies and their impact on democratic institutions”, providing a continuously updated database useful to know the numbers, types, contents and, in a broader sense, the scope of punitive legislative acts approved by the Italian legislature: through the Normattiva search engine, thousands of measures adopted since 1 January 1993 have been identified, analyzed and catalogued. In particular, the following were considered:
- at the level of sources, constitutional law, ordinary law, acts having the force of law and decrees (ministerial and interministerial);
- at the level of typologies, all measures affecting la matière penal in the broadest sense elaborated by the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (therefore, also included are administrative offenses which, although formally distinct, are substantially criminal in nature);
- at the level of content, the measures that affect the position of the offender, both in an ameliorative and a pejorative sense, distinguishing between changes affecting crimes, administrative offenses, punitive consequences, measures limiting personal freedom, police powers, and powers of public actors.
The Observatory aims to produce an annually updated report on the evolution of criminal and security legislation in Italy.
