Rome, 20 December (LaPresse) – ‘The principle of due process, which we all faithfully observe, consists of three elements: emphasising the presumption of innocence, ensuring certainty of punishment, and rehabilitating convicted prisoners.’ This was stated by the Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio, during his video address to the “Nessuno tocchi Caino” (Nobody touch Cain) conference, which was held in the Puntozero Theatre of the Cesare Beccaria Institute for Minors in Milan. In exploring the first of the three key aspects of the presumption of innocence, Nordio pointed out that “there are more than 15,000 people in prison who are not serving a final sentence, and a large proportion of these are then released because their detention has proved to be unjustified”. The government, he continued, “intends to take action to limit preventive detention as much as possible, precisely in accordance with the presumption of innocence”. With regard to the certainty of punishment, specifying that it must be enforced because otherwise ‘the state would lose its authority’, the Minister reconfirmed his opposition ‘to early release without assessing each case individually in order to reduce the prison population’, primarily because ‘it would mean more than a show of leniency, it would be a surrender on the part of the state’. Secondly, Nordio recalled that, after the pardon granted during the Prodi government, “the prison population had actually increased after a year, despite the extremely large number of releases”.