At its Human Rights meeting on 17-19 September, the Committee of Ministers ended its supervision of the Abenavoli v. Italy judgment, which has been the leading case to a group of cases concerning violations of Article 6 of the Convention on account of the excessive length of administrative proceedings. More than one hundred repetitive cases belonging to this group of cases were already closed previously as all necessary individual measures had been taken.
Following the entry into force in 2010 of the new Code of Administrative Procedure, the Italian authorities adopted a wide range of measures notably aimed at reorganising the public administration system, modernising and streamlining administrative justice, limiting the number of new proceedings, and speeding up absorption of backlogs.
The authorities’ action was further strengthened by the increased recruitment of judges and supporting staff, the full digitisation of administrative court proceedings and the additional financial resources awarded by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan.
These measures yielded positive and consolidated results with regard to all major relevant indicators (i.e. clearance rate, disposition time and inflow of cases), bringing the average length of administrative proceedings within acceptable perimeters and placing the administrative justice system on sustainable and efficient tracks which can be expected to continue generating further advances in the years to come.
In the light of the above and taking also into account the existence in Italy of an effective compensatory remedy for excessively lengthy judicial proceedings, similar violations should no longer occur.
