Keywords: European Convention of Human Rights; Parliamentary Supremacy; Decree Laws of the Government; Structural Problems before the ECtHR.
The article
analyses how legislative power in Italy has shifted away from the Parliament to
the Government as a consequence of the duty to abide by the final judgments of the
European Court of Human Rights (Art. 46.1 ECHR). Analysing the follow up of the
Strasbourg judgments calling for legislative reforms, it results that the most utilized
tool to that aim is the decree law enacted by the Government. The quality of this
kind of "emergency legislation" is often inadequate to solve the structural problems
at the origin of Convention violations. A possible solution is to give a reinforced role
to the ordinary parliamentary legislation, where the full transparency and the appropriate
length of democratic debate are far more respected than in the procedures
following the decree laws of the Government.