Editorial of the dossier “Personal freedom and precautionary measures in criminal proceedings” – The personal freedom of the accused between principles and practices pending an organic reform of Italian criminal justice

The paper summarizes the evolutionary course of the discipline of personal precautionary measures in the light of the rights enshrined in the Italian Constitutional Charter and in the supranational charters, noting how the regulatory perimeter already marked for some time in this regard - and today inserted in the context of a multilevel system - did not prevent discussed application practices and cyclical legislative fluctuations. Valuable in its original structure, although always perfectible, the discipline of personal precautionary measures remains a sectoral legislation, outlining a subsystem highly sensitive to the balance of the criminal process that cannot find autonomous pacification without a contextual revision of the penal and procedural system. The exceptional political-economic situation caused by the health emergency gives hope that the delegated law for the reform of justice that is currently being approved will finally let the phoenix appear of an efficiency of the criminal process unknown - in the memory of a living man - to our legal system