[Experts according to Art. 80, Paragraph IV, Law No. 354, 26 July 1975, and the obligation to professional secrecy].

Abstract

The multiplicity of advertising "concerns" acts, with a more prominent emphasis in recent times, as the necessary condition for an increasing deterioration of professional reserve to the level of a merely formal statement. Especially as regards the medical profession, as broadly understood, the institution of "specialist categories" directly tied to "public bodies" and to "agencies", private or public, responsible for or helping to effect, the "monitoring" of special characteristics peculiar to the most intimate sphere of subjectivity, remarkable "deviations" can be observed as against the anamnestic (having to do with case histories--trans.), analytic, and clearly therapeutic safeguarding that, to the contrary, ought to receive an inviolable defense on the part of the Italian regulatory system--executive, in the sense of rigorous constitutional provisions. To emphasize the deep erosion of professional reserve, demonstrable to the highest degree by the present levels of penal doctrine and jurisprudence as specifically regards criminal cases sanctioned by art. 622 of the penal code, is therefore equivalent to the bringing into focus of a general social and regulatory problem, one that is obviously expanding, as regards its importance and its capacity to "alarm", within the sphere of the observation of personality and of institutionalized treatment as prescribed by the law of 26 July 1975, no. 354, bearing the title "Penitentiary Organization". The need for establishing a climate of "confidentiality"--confirmed by a number of papers on criminology and "penitentiary technique"--among the convicts, and "therapy", is therefore included within the considerably larger theme of the rights of the condemned person, of his assent to being subjected to "resocializing operations", as well as of the guarantee of not having to undergo further negative consequences, beyond his state of restricted freedom, whether on the legal plane or on the plane of his psycho-physical integrity. Therefore, quite beyond the many-sided (and often these are used as pretexts) "just reasons" brought forth to justify any information, setting specifically aside that of the "consultants spoken of in art. 80" of the law cited, concerning confidential data or anyway sources of harm to the passive subjects, it is urgent that there be given an extremely severe interpretation of the law's provisions, there being symbiotically acknowledged the right to abstain, as regards the consultants themselves, from the "divulging" of any information beyond their strictly medical opinion, and the option for those subjected to observation and treatment to make out a complaint where there are the requisites tending to make the possibility of a crime's having been committed a concrete fact.