“Test for magistrates: necessity or political revenge?” was the title of the first debate organized by Dubbio al International Book Fair in Turin in which the Dem participated Anna Rossomandovice-president of the Senate, Enrico Costahead of justice at Action, Fabrizio Staracedirector of the Department of Mental Health and Pathological Addictions of the Modena Local Health Authority and president of the Italian Society of Psychiatric Epidemiology (Siep), Armando Spataroformer magistrate, who discussed the new rule introduced by the Government according to which from 2026 aspiring magistrates will also have to undergo a psycho-aptitude assessment.
For the representative of the Democratic Party «the rule on psycho-aptitude tests falls into the category of measures taken by this government for purely propaganda purposes. We are at the point of provocation, while fundamental issues such as the implementation of the reforms approved by a very large majority in the last legislature continue to be evaded. All this with a view to reopening the political-judiciary clash and instead ignoring fundamental issues such as the timing of justice or the status of interventions financed and planned by Pnrr and other funds, for a total of over 3 billion. It would be useful for the government to focus on this and not on propaganda interventions, such as psycho-aptitude tests, from which a truly authoritarian idea of the relationship between citizen and state emerges.”
Enrico Costa continued: «I may surprise you but I quite agree with Anna Rossomando. There must be a style in preparing the legal provisions and an innovative path which with changes of this magnitude must guarantee in-depth analysis. All the rules of the past – whether they were bills or decree laws in the process of conversion – have gone through hearings. In this case the Government introduced an innovation that was not in the delegation, without adequate discussion. The Government delegated the writing of the law to the rapporteurs in the Justice Commission and then ultimately delegated it to the CSM. I don’t know if it’s revenge but at least a bizarre way of approving the law.”
On the merits, according to the parliamentarian, «this new rule is useless. What matters is the professionalism assessment, which to date is 99.6% positive. And this is not good because the outcomes of the proceedings should be evaluated. But even on this occasion the Government weakened the rule because it decided to evaluate on a sample basis.”
The issue has also divided the scientific world, in particular psychiatrists in favor and psychoanalysts against. Starace told us: «We must take maximum care of the magistrates who are true professionals. To do this it is necessary to select this group of professionals on the basis of skills, competences and motivations. I believe that at the basis of the debate that has been created there is a misunderstanding: a psycho-aptitude test is not a tool for detecting a psychiatric pathology nor would it be appropriate to do so to people who have already passed tests with the competition, passing the written and oral tests, having previously been law students. The test is simply a tool that aims to be predictive of the aptitude characteristics that must be specific to a certain professional profile. And it is in these terms that I believe the rule is expressed. A profile that will be different depending on the areas in which the magistrate will be involved: the requests for those who deal with bankruptcy law will be one thing, those for those who will have to deal with heinous crimes will be another.” And he concluded: «A study conducted a few years ago in the United States on a thousand magistrates objectively showed that they had high levels of stress, anxiety, depression, 10 percent were at risk of alcohol abuse».
Then the former magistrate Armando Spataro intervened: «The tests as conceived by the Government are not foreseen to evaluate stress during the career but only in the competition phase, after those enrolled to evaluate the aptitude to be a magistrate. The technical formulation of the law should not be marginalized: there is an enabling law dating back to 2022 which has only been partially implemented, but the choice to include these tests in the system is absolutely unconstitutional. First of all because the Constitution provides that one becomes a magistrate through competition. No competition could be tied to tests.”
