La natura della responsbilità amministrativa avanti alla Corte dei Conti: considerazioni alla luce della riforma di cui alla legge n. 1 del 2026

The essay aims to investigate how the recent reform of administrative liability may affect the qualification of the latter under the ECHR. Having reviewed the case-law that have been established on this point (and in particular the well-known Rigoglio judgment of the ECHR), it comes to the conclusion that, while the Rigoglio case-law was already questionable in several respects, as it was not in line with the public/punitive characterisation of administrative liability, the reform seems to have significantly accentuated the punitive elements in the strict sense and therefore criminal in light of the Engel criteria. In particular, there appears to be a departure from the necessary proportionality between financial damage and the amount of the penalty, which appears, in ECHR case law, to be one of the main criteria for distinguishing between civil and criminal law in the case of financial penalties. In fact, by now, the amount of the penalty is, in order to prevent so-called “defensive bureaucracy”, based on the economic remuneration of the public official, rather than on the actual extent of the damage.