Abstract

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.