Direct Application of International Treaty Law before Italian Domestic Courts – The Tension between Jurisprudence and Scholarship

This article evaluates the development of the issue of direct applicability of treaties by Italy’s judges against the relevant Italian international legal scholarship. It shows that the common understanding on the implementation of self-executive treaty rules is not followed by a shared construct of the self-executing character nor the direct effects of treaty rules in the Italian legal order. It argues that this divergence is mainly due to Italy’s framework of the rules which are sourced by treaties, and to the trend towards centralized control of constitutionality of Italian statutes against these rules. The article focuses on some recent controversial case law where direct applicability of (certain) human rights conventions was denied outright. It then relates case law on these treaties to case law on uniform private law conventions, which are instead directly applied to interpersonal relations, to identify court-based relevant elements for direct application of international treaties having a natural predilection to address individual situations.