Italy: The Pinto Remedy and Where It Stops Working

Italy introduced Law no. 89 of 24 March 2001 — the Pinto Law — after a long run of adverse judgments in Strasbourg over the length of its proceedings. It allows a party harmed by unreasonable delay to claim compensation before the competent court of appeal, without going to Strasbourg first. It was designed, quite deliberately, to keep those cases at home.

For a creditor with an Italian judgment that is not being enforced, this is not optional background. It is the remedy the Court will ask whether you used.

The Court accepted the Pinto remedy as one that must in principle be exhausted. An application from Italy complaining of delay, lodged without having gone through it, will normally be rejected without reaching the substance. That is the single most common way an otherwise sound Italian file is lost.

• The amounts awarded

  Domestic awards were for years substantially below what Strasbourg considered adequate in comparable cases. A remedy that compensates at a fraction of the appropriate level does not necessarily deprive an applicant of victim status — Scordino v. Italy (No. 1) [GC], no. 36813/97, 29 March 2006.

• Payment of the Pinto award itself

  Compensation ordered under the remedy has itself gone unpaid for long periods — the delay remedy reproducing the delay it was created to cure. Gaglione and Others v. Italy, no. 45867/07, 21 December 2010.

• Scope

  The remedy is built around the length of proceedings. Where the grievance is that a final judgment is simply not being executed, the fit is imperfect and needs to be argued rather than assumed.

The remedy was conceived for the length of proceedings. A creditor whose complaint is that a municipality holds a final judgment against it and does not pay is arguing something adjacent: the proceedings ended, and the outcome was never delivered.

That distinction decides how the file is built. Where the enforcement stage is itself a set of proceedings that has dragged on, the remedy fits and must be used. Where the authority has simply not paid and there is nothing further to enforce domestically, the argument is that the remedy is not effective for this complaint — and that argument has to be made on the record, with the attempts documented, not asserted afterwards in Strasbourg.

Use the remedy, and document what it produced. An unsuccessful or inadequate Pinto outcome is not a wasted step — it is the evidence that the domestic system was given its chance and did not deliver, which is precisely what an application to Strasbourg has to establish.