Italy (country report)

The Italian Constitutional Court (hereafter ICC or “the Court”) has long characterized its position within the constitutional system by exercising a significant effort in coordinating its powers both with other constitutional institutions (“horizontal relationality”) and with international and supranational law (“vertical relationality”). Accordingly, our report on constitutional developments in 2016 primarily focused on aspects of vertical relationality, while our 2017 report focused on horizontal relationality. These dimensions remained crucial in 2018: in particular, the Court intensified its capacity of relationality with civil society by organizing an unprecedented number of visits by constitutional judges to public schools and prisons. Last year’s case law also stands out for an apparent judicial engagement on fundamental rights. The Court reasserted its crucial role in one of the most classical and characterizing this concern emerges more clearly in crucial developments concerning limits to the judicial enforcement of rights (and focusing in particular on significant decisions reported in Part II concerning the mitigation of correctional harshness, alternatives to mandatory sentences, and end-of-life choices), it runs through many other segments of the 2018 ICC’s case law (Part III).