Research database

As the offices of public prosecutors do not have sufficient resources to handle all the crime reports they receive, the public prosecutors are forced to indicate, in the organisational plans of the office, what reports are to be given priority. Law no. 71/2022 established that these priority indications shall be made, from now on, in compliance with general criteria to be set by the Parliament. This aims at levelling out as much as possible the prosecutors’ choices throughout the Country, as well as ensuring compliance with the constitutional principles of trial efficiency and mandatory prosecution. This research intends to provide the Parliament and public prosecutors with effective tools to apply the new rules. The work is composed of several parts and includes numerous units to portray local and regional features and to ensure an in-depth analysis of possible problems arising from the aforementioned rules. The first phase of the research will focus on collecting data on how Italian public prosecutors’ offices currently make priority choices. The cataloguing of organisational plans will be followed by specific questionnaires and by an analysis of software used in the judicial system for the effective management of the workload. The second phase will be devoted to processing the data collected locally and to identifying problematic profiles to be investigated by the units. The analysis will be carried out by looking both at the state of the art in doctrine and jurisprudence, as well as at the most relevant civil law and common law systems suitable for comparison. In the third phase, the results will be analysed to provide institutions with proposals for managing crime reports flows. This activity will lead to: a) a regulatory model for identifying the general criteria for the definition of priorities; b) a prototype to organise public prosecution offices on the basis of said priorities; c) a mathematical model and the related software to implement the aforementioned organisational plans. The last phase will be devoted to dissemination. The proposals will be presented and discussed with representatives of the Parliament and the judiciary. The findings will also be published and updated on a dedicated website, as well as disseminated within the scientific community through the organisation of conferences and the publication of a collective work.