Italy’s justice minister wants to tighten wiretapping rules

Italy’s investigators resort to eavesdropping faster and more frequently than their European colleagues. This leads to successful searches, but also to abuse.

MPrime Minister Giorgia Meloni was on a plane to Algiers a week ago on Monday, where she agreed on further natural gas deliveries and the intensification of energy cooperation, when she still had an urgent matter to attend to at home. Through the office of prime minister, she let it be known that she had “complete trust” in Minister of Justice Carlo Nordio. On Thursday she received the minister at her official residence. It was agreed that judicial reform was an “absolute priority” for government work and should be implemented as soon as possible, it said.

Rumors about an impending resignation of Nordios had previously run rampant. The minister had previously come under fire not only from the opposition, but also from the ranks of the coalition. The subject of the dispute is Nordio’s plans to tighten the rules on wiretapping of telephone conversations and eavesdropping on electronic communications. The minister from Meloni’s right-wing conservative Brothers of Italy party presented the reform plan in parliament in early December. The debate picked up momentum after the January 16 arrest of Sicilian mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro. The investigators, it was learned, had found out about the godfather, who had been in hiding for three decades, after they found out about his cancer from wiretapped telephone calls from his relatives and were subsequently able to identify him as a patient under a false name in a clinic in Palermo.