Disbelief, disbelief, anger. These are the emotions I felt when I read the news a few days ago concerning the “Eternit bis” trial, which is taking place in Turin, in which the Swiss entrepreneur Stephan Schmidheiny is accused of the death of a former worker and a man who resided near an Eternit factory.
The Court of Appeal should have issued the sentence last week, but everything was postponed for an incredible reason: the USB stick in which the documents were contained was found to be unusable because it was “empty or damaged”. The judges said they were “mortified” but had no choice when they went to look for a specific passage of technical advice (relevant to the decision) and found nothing. For this reason, the trial was postponed to the end of September. In these two months we will try to reconstruct the acts of the case, but it will not be easy: about 90% of them are missing. It is interesting (especially for non-experts) to know how the reconstruction of the acts will take place. The Turin Court of Appeal has asked the Public Prosecutor to recover the material and the magistrate said he will turn to the colleague who supported the accusation in the first instance trial to see if he can help.
It sounds unbelievable, but it’s all true. In the era of cloud and artificial intelligence, the document management of a process – particularly important among other things – is carried out through a USB key, whose reliability limits we should all know by now.
What happened in Turin is not only a sign of the country’s digital backwardness, but also of the failure of some innovation policies in the public sphere, such as those linked to the digitalization of justice. After over twenty years of rules on the electronic process, millions of euros in investments, this is the product of pompous announcements relating to strategies and legislative interventions which, up to now, have had an impact far below expectations. Is it really possible, and tolerable, that the filing of the documents of a process can be handled in such an amateur way? What has been done for the digital skills of the process parties? (by now we should all know the limits of USB devices) What have been the interventions in the field of cybersecurity? (there is someone who claims that the infamous key may have been tampered with).
Is there to regret the paper files then? Let’s not exaggerate. Apart from the fact that these things happened even before, the theme is that digital technologies could be used precisely to remedy the problems of the traditional system, making the justice sector more efficient and faster. How they are doing outside our borders. In Estonia, for example, thanks to the Court information system project, in ten years, the average length of a criminal case has dropped from 650 days to less than 200. In China, they are even experimenting with the possibility of entrusting the public prosecution to a algorithm (a robot attorney). Perhaps too much, certainly dangerous considering the current state of artificial intelligence.
In short, while the world is experimenting with the use of technologies to make the system more efficient, in Italy the questionable use of inadequate systems lengthens the process times. What happened in Turin must also be a warning in view of the implementation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. The PNRR, in fact, allocates approximately 140 million euros for the strengthening of the telematic systems for the management of legal activities. But one wonders what guarantees there are on the fact that on this occasion not only “the money is spent”, but the impact has been achieved in terms of reducing the time and costs of justice. And then: can we really afford to wait until 2026 to see something change? In fact, making justice more efficient thanks to digital means improving our democracy and attracting investments. In short, we cannot waste any more time.
For this reason there is a need for urgent and symbolic choices, also to prevent what happened in Turin from happening again, with even more serious consequences for the victims of crimes and for the accused.
It would therefore be desirable for the Ministry of Justice to immediately take all necessary steps to avoid the use of USB sticks by magistrates and judicial offices. Safer systems already exist and can be used immediately. All it takes is instruction and training.