Pand the Milan Surveillance Court “respects the Convention on Human Rights”
The Milan Surveillance Court has accepted the appeal filed by a prisoner subjected to the 41 bis regime at the Opera prison, establishing that he has the right to interviews with his family members, including via video call.
According to the magistrate, "compliance with the Constitution and the Convention on Human Rights makes it necessary to also recognize" "the prisoner subjected to 41 bis the right to have video calls with his family members in place of face-to-face conversations, according to the methods identified by the prison administration and within the limits deriving from the number of workstations".
The prisoner complained of the impossibility of communicating with his wife, who lives in Sicily and whom he has not seen for years, and with his two children, who are also incarcerated in other institutions. The Opera prison, opposing, had asked for the rejection of the complaint, arguing that it was a request dictated by a "mere personal interest not related to the violation of subjective rights".
The prison management had also raised “organizational contraindications”, explaining that the rooms used for video calls coincide with those dedicated to criminal hearings via videoconference, and that the high number of inmates and the few available workstations make management complex.
However, Judge Beatrice Secchi recalled the need for a balance between the demands of the harsh prison regime and the rights of prisoners: in fact, there remains "the need to achieve a correct balance between the demands of the 41 bis regime and that of guaranteeing the effectiveness of the right to maintain family ties through the use of visits".
The right to speak with family members, the judge recalled, is protected by the Constitution through Articles 29, 30 and 31, as well as by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Il regime 41 bis, Secchi further stressed, is legitimate "only if it is functional not to ensure an excess of punishment for the perpetrators of particularly serious crimes, but rather exclusively to contain the persistent dangerousness of individual prisoners", provided that the restrictions are not "disproportionate or such as to completely nullify the re-educational function of the sentence".
Since 2022, remote visual interviews — introduced as an emergency measure during the pandemic — have remained in force for inmates in medium and high security circuits. The Department of Penitentiary Administration (Dap) uses a secure intranet, which ensures security, prevents external intrusions and allows for recording and interruption of interviews, if necessary.
In light of this framework, the right to video call interviews, according to the Court, "must be recognized not only in cases where the family member cannot have the interview in person due to 'age or illness', but also for different reasons that are also easily documented: there is no reasonable reason to require the family member to make long journeys to go, each time, to the penitentiary institution where the prisoner is held, often crossing Italy and incurring considerable costs".
As for children, "the right to have video call interviews must be recognized when the family member is also detained, provided that the in-person interview has been authorized".
Article published on 13 June 2025 - 13:09
It is an important fact that the court of Milan has decided to give rights also to prisoners in 41 bis. However, I wonder if the resources are sufficient to manage all the video call interviews, because there are many problems to consider.