Italian Constitutional Court (Corte costituzionale italiana), No. 276/2016, 16 December 2016

Regional elective offices.

Art. 3, Constitution
Art. 51, Constitution
Art. 8, par. 1, D. lgs. no. 235/2012

1. The legislature's choice to differentiate between the conditions for the applicability of suspension and incandidability, making only the application of the penalty imposed subject to the same conditions, cannot therefore be considered unreasonable, bearing in mind also that the status of Members of Parliament is backed by constitutionally protected guarantees, which would place limits on the extension by ordinary law of the institution of suspension of the parliamentary mandate.

2. The aim of safeguarding good conduct and legality in public administration may justify more severe treatment in the assessment of convictions for offences against public administration inflicted on regional councillors, since part of the functions they perform are of an administrative nature.
(The question of the constitutional legitimacy of Article 8, paragraph 1, letter a), of Legislative Decree no. 235 of 2012, censured by the Court of Appeal of Bari, with reference to Articles 3 and 51 of the Constitution, is declared unfounded insofar as it does not provide - for the purposes of suspension from elected regional offices in the event of conviction for certain offences - a threshold of a sentence of more than two years, as instead established for national and European parliamentarians for the purposes of incandidability).