Il valore della CEDU nella giurisprudenza costituzionale italiana

The article deals with the evolution of the jurisprudence of the Italian Constitutional Court concerning the legal status of the European Convention on Human Rights within the Italian legal order. Indeed, the Court has always tried to come through the gap between the formal value of ordinary law recognized in Italy to the Convention and its substantive content. After the constitutional reform of 2001, in its well-known judgments Nos. 348 and 349 of 2007, the Constitutional Court provided for a solution to the issue concerning the Convention’s value, recognizing its sub-constitutional status, as an “interposed source of law”. Nevertheless, the legal value of the European Convention on Human Rights as interposed source of law was reconsidered in the following constitutional case-law and it is still an open problem, because in some most recent judgments the Constitutional Court is inclined to balance the demands of the general interest of the community with the requirements of the protection of the individual’s fundamental rights and declares that a wide margin of appreciation exists with regard to the enforcement of ECHR also for the domestic judges.