CEDH · CASELAW;JUDGMENTS;CHAMBER;ENG — 25 septembre 2025

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ITALY (Applications nos. 36551/22, 36926/22 and 37907/22)   JUDGMENT   Art 1 P1 • Peaceful enjoyment of possessions • Disproportionate non-conviction-based confiscation (“preventive confiscation”) of the applicants’ assets considered to be proceeds of unlawful activities committed or presumably committed by the first applicant • Significant time elapsed since the commission of the predicate offences on which confiscation was based • Shortcomings in domestic courts’ decisions serious and manifestly incompatible with limitations and safeguards established under domestic law and case-law • Domestic authorities’ failure to establish any link between the first applicant’s criminal activities and the confiscated assets • Fair balance not struck   Prepared by the Registry. Does not bind the Court.   STRASBOURG 25 September 2025   FINAL   11/05/2026   This judgment has become final under Article 44 § 2 of the Convention. It may be subject to editorial revision. In the case of Isaia and Others v. Italy, The European Court of Human Rights (First Section), sitting as a Chamber composed of:   Ivana Jelić , President ,   Erik Wennerström,   Gilberto Felici,   Raffaele Sabato,   Frédéric Krenc,   Davor Derenčinović,   Alain Chablais , judges , and Ilse Freiwirth, Section Registrar, Having regard to: the applications (nos.   36551/22, 36926/22 and 37907/22) against the Italian Republic lodged with the Court under Article 34 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (“the Convention”) by three Italian nationals (“the applicants”), on the various dates indicated in the appended table; the decision to give notice of the applications to the Italian Government (“the Government”); the comments submitted by the association Unione delle Camere Penali Italiane, which had been invited by the President of the Section to intervene; Having deliberated in private on 10 June and 8 July 2025, Delivers the following judgment, which was adopted on that last-mentioned date: INTRODUCTION 1.     The case concerns the “preventive confiscation” ( confisca di prevenzione ) of the applicants’ assets, ordered by the competent domestic courts under Article 24 of Legislative Decree no. 159 of 6   September 2011 ( Codice delle leggi antimafia e delle misure di prevenzione (Code of Anti ‑ Mafia Laws and Preventive Measures) – “Decree no.   159/2011”), as a result of the first applicant’s status as an individual who had posed a danger to society during a certain period of time and of the fact that the confiscated assets were considered to be the proceeds of unlawful activities committed or presumably committed during that period. The applicants complained that the domestic courts’ decisions had not been in compliance with the conditions established under domestic law and case-law for the imposition of the contested measure. THE FACTS 2.     The applicants, who were born in 1964, 1968 and 1991 respectively and live in Bagheria, were represented by Mr A. Turrisi, a lawyer practising in Palermo. 3.     The Government were represented by their Agent, Mr L. D’Ascia, Avvocato dello Stato . 4.     The facts of the case may be summarised as follows. 5 .     On 13 December 2018 the head of the Palermo local police authority ( questore ) lodged an application with the Palermo District Court, Preventive Measures Division, seeking to obtain a declaration that Mr Giuseppe Isaia, the first applicant, was an individual who posed an “ordinary” danger to society ( pericolosità generica ) within the meaning of Article   1 §   1 (a) and   (b) of Decree no.   159/2011, on account, in particular, of his being an individual who, on the basis of factual evidence, could be regarded as a “habitual offender” and an individual “habitually living, even in part, on the proceeds of crime” (see paragraph 20 below). The questore further asked the competent court to order the seizure and subsequent confiscation under Article 24 of Decree no.   159/2011 (see paragraph 20 below) of several assets directly and indirectly at the disposal of the person in question ( proposto , that is, the person directly concerned by a request to apply a preventive measure), in particular, assets owned by the first applicant, his wife (the second applicant) and his son (the third applicant). 6 .     On 20 December 2018 the Palermo District Court, Preventive Measures Division, ordered the seizure of the assets indicated in the application lodged by the questore ,: (a) an apartment within a public housing unit ( abitazione di tipo popolare ) officially purchased by the second applicant on 1 June 2010; (b) a plot of land and a residential building officially purchased by the third applicant on 21   November 2016; (c)   a warehouse officially purchased by the second applicant on 10 June 2016; (d)   a car officially purchased by the third applicant on 5 March 2018; (e) the available balances of the bank accounts in the three applicants’ names opened by the first applicant in 1994 and 2014, by the second applicant in 1999 and 2016, and by the third applicant in 2016. 7 .     On 4 August 2020 the Palermo District Court granted the questore ’s request and ordered the confiscation of the seized assets. The court considered that the first applicant had been an individual who posed a danger to society within the meaning of Article 1 §   1 (b) of Decree no.   159/2011 since he had been “habitually living, even in part, on the proceeds of crime” in the period between 1980 and 2008. It observed the following: “This assessment is based on the indisputable and uncontested fact, reported by the proposto himself, of the numerous final convictions handed down by the Assize Court against [the first applicant] for numerous property offences and in particular several robberies or attempted robberies in 1980, 1993, 1994, 1995, and again in 1998, aggravated theft in 1980 and 2008, extortion committed in 1987, conspiracy to commit robbery between 1990 and 1995, and handling stolen goods in 1995, and therefore committed without substantial interruption (taking into account the periods in which the applicant was detained [from 1999 and 2006]) over a period of several decades. Therefore, considering the repeated participation in the above-mentioned criminal conduct, which relates to numerous and serious property offences, also committed in association with others, the conditions required to classify the proposto in the above-mentioned category of dangerousness must be deemed to exist in the present case, as do, therefore, the subjective conditions that justify the requested confiscation.” 8 .     It emerges from the applicant’s criminal record that in most of the cases the domestic authorities confiscated unspecified goods at the moment of conviction. As to the extortion committed in 1987, the Palermo Court of Appeal applied mitigating circumstances, defined under Article 62 § 6 of the Criminal Code as making “full reparation of the damage prior to trial, either through compensation or, where possible, through restitution; [and] eliminating or mitigating the harmful or dangerous consequences of the offence ...”. Also, it appears from the criminal record that the thefts committed in 1988 and 2008 and the robberies committed in 1980, 1994, and 1995 were attempted offences [1] . 9 .     As to the link between the assets confiscated and the unlawful activities, the Palermo District Court examined only the disproportionate relationship between the assets owned and the amount of income earned, establishing as follows: “The seizure order was based on financial investigations carried out [in respect of the first applicant], which revealed that his and his family’s lawful income was completely disproportionate to the value of the assets purchased. [T]he expert reconstructed the income received by the proposto and other members of the above-mentioned household since 1990 ... In addition, the expert took into account the expenses incurred for purchases and investments made, as well as the household expenses of the above-mentioned family unit, quantifying them on the basis of the tables drawn up by the National Statistics Institute (ISTAT), taking into account for each year its actual numerical composition, which changed over the years under examination, and excluding the cost of renting a property for the years in which the household in question appears to have lived in a property owned by them ... However, that statement contains significant errors made by the expert in recording certain income and expenditure items, which must be taken into account ... As regards the accuracy of the statistical data processed by ISTAT, it suffices to note, in general terms, that the need to use statistical data to determine household expenses stems from the practical impossibility of reconstructing such data analytically owing to the lack of reliable information in this regard. Obviously, although statistical data cannot provide an exact determination of the expenses actually incurred by a given household, they do provide a benchmark that allows for a fairly accurate assessment of the correlation between verified income and the expenses necessarily incurred for the maintenance of the household. In other words, the statistical data appear representative only if considered in their entirety and intrinsic generality, without being related to the specific lifestyle habits of the household in question, since this would require abandoning the statistical method and resorting to an analytical reconstruction of household expenses, which in the present case is impossible owing to the lack of reliable reference data, and the fact that the lifestyle habits of the family unit under investigation are neither known nor proved, and are likely to have evolved over the long period under consideration (from 1990 to 2017)”. 10.     The court also observed, on the basis of the expert assessment, that the lawful income of the applicants was insufficient to justify the assets they owned, for example, the purchase, in 2010, 2016 and 2018, of the seized properties (see paragraph 6 above); they could also not account for the provenance of the sums of money deposited in their bank accounts. 11 .     It further noted that the first applicant had accumulated wealth by selling properties that had been acquired through unlawful means and during the period in which he had posed a danger to society. In particular, the Palermo District Court observed that the first applicant had purchased a property in 1994, when he had had no lawful income and during a period in which he had committed several criminal offences. Although the applicants had argued that that purchase had been made with a sum of money gifted by the second applicant’s grandfather, the court considered that it was not credible that such a sum of money would have been used to purchase a property and not satisfy the basic needs of the family, given the absence of any other lawful income. Therefore, according to the court, that property had been purchased with the unlawful proceeds of the criminal offences committed by the first applicant in that period. The court, however without providing any details, further observed that the property had subsequently been sold, and that the proceeds of the sale had been used several times to buy other properties. Therefore, in the court’s view, all the subsequent properties acquired by the applicants’ family had been purchased by reinvesting the unlawful proceeds of the crimes committed by the first applicant, and had been used in 1994 to buy the property in question. 12 .     On 9 September 2020 the applicants appealed against that judgment before the Palermo Court of Appeal. They argued that the first applicant could not have been considered an individual posing a danger to society in the period between 1998 and 2008, because the crimes he had committed had taken place between 1980 and 1998, and in 2008 he had merely committed the offence of attempted theft. The applicants further disagreed with the assessment of the first-instance court that they had had insufficient lawful income capable of justifying the purchase of the confiscated assets. 13 .     On 7 May 2021 the Palermo Court of Appeal dismissed the applicants’ appeal. The court upheld the finding that the first applicant had to be considered an individual posing a danger to society in the period between 1980 and 2008. Furthermore, the Court of Appeal established that the unlawful origin of the confiscated assets, could be presumed from the disproportionate relationship between assets owned and income alone: “Having established [the first applicant’s] dangerousness, the Court observes that, in matters of preventive confiscation, a disproportionate relationship [between assets owned and income] constitutes evidence of the unlawful origin of the assets; the legislature has in fact indicated, by way of example, as a possible indication – perhaps even the only one – of the unlawful origin of assets, the disproportionate relationship between the use of capital and the amount of known income, an element from which – once proven by the public prosecutor – it is reasonable to infer unknown income, which, under normal circumstances, is the result of illegal income-generating activities, as corroborated by the finding that the proposto carried out such activities ...” 14.     According to the Court of Appeal, once such a presumption has been established, “... only positive proof of the lawful origin of the assets, in economic terms and not only in legal and formal terms, constitutes valid justification for an objectively disproportionate income-to-asset ratio ..., the burden of proof regarding the lawful origin of the assets cannot be satisfied by merely indicating the existence of sufficient funds for their purchase, but instead the factual elements from which the judge can infer that the asset was not purchased with the proceeds of illegal activities or through expenditure that is disproportionate to the individual’s income must be indicated ...” 15.     With regard to the assets formally owned by family members or cohabitants, the Court of Appeal held that “... the judicial assessment of the availability, on the part of the proposto , of assets formally registered in the name of third parties operates differently for the spouse, children and cohabitants of the defendant than for all other natural and legal persons, in that, with regard to the former [close relatives], such availability is legitimately presumed without the need for specific investigations, where and provided that the third-party owner has no economic resources of their own, while, with regard to the latter [unrelated third parties], specific evidence must be obtained regarding the fictitious nature of the registration ...” 16.     The Court of Appeal observed that the confiscated assets had been purchased either during the period in issue, or using economic resources that derived from the sale of assets acquired in that period. It also observed that a disproportionate relationship between the assets owned and the family’s income had been established, and that the assets belonged to family members who did not have sufficient economic resources to justify their purchase. Therefore the Court of Appeal, like the first instance court, concluded that the assets had been purchased through unlawful means (see paragraph 11 above). 17.     On 19 May 2021 the applicants lodged an appeal on points of law with the Court of Cassation. They complained, in particular, of the absence of a temporal correlation between the period in which the first applicant had posed a danger to society and the point in time at which the confiscated assets had been purchased (see paragraphs 25-30 below). They further argued that the appeal judgment had been insufficiently reasoned, as the domestic court had failed to demonstrate on what grounds it could be argued that assets acquired after the period in which the first applicant had committed criminal offences could be considered the proceeds of unlawful activities. 18 .     On 14 December 2021 the Advocate General before the Court of Cassation requested it to uphold the applicants’ appeal on points of law. Relying on the relevant case-law of the Court of Cassation, he observed that, under domestic law, assets acquired outside the period in which the addressee of the measure had committed criminal offences could only be confiscated where there were multiple factual elements demonstrating that those assets had been purchased using economic resources accumulated during that period. According to the Advocate General, however, the domestic courts had merely relied on the absence of proportionality between the value of the confiscated assets and the applicants’ lawful income, in breach of the limitations established under domestic law. Accordingly, the Advocate General concluded that the measure had been ordered in breach of the principle of temporal correlation between the period in which the person in question had been committing criminal offences and the purchase of the confiscated assets. 19 .     In judgment no. 13458 of 7 April 2022, the Court of Cassation dismissed the applicants’ appeal on points of law. It admitted that, in principle, only assets that had been purchased during the period in which the person in question had been committing criminal offences could be subjected to the measure at issue. However, it also observed that the relevant domestic case-law had acknowledged the possibility of confiscating assets acquired after that period, provided that there were sufficient factual elements capable of demonstrating that they had been acquired using economic resources accumulated during the period in question. In the specific circumstances of the case, the Court of Cassation considered that the lower courts had demonstrated that the confiscated assets had been purchased using economic resources accumulated during the period in which the first applicant had posed a danger to society on account of his committing several criminal offences (see paragraph 11 above). In particular, it held as follows: “ ... the regional court, having limited the temporal scope of the presumption of danger to society and assessed the overall availability of the assets acquired by the family ( proposto and close relatives), in ordering the confiscation also of the assets which were acquired outside of the specific time frame (albeit not by much), has not only highlighted the actual discrepancy between the value of the assets and the overall income of the entire family, but also the (illegal) origin of the funds which were used to purchase those assets subject to the confiscation order, acquired through the sale of other assets, which were themselves the result of the laundering of illegal proceeds from criminal activity. At the same time, it acknowledged the specific arguments put forward by the defence in the light of a reasonable reconstruction of the family’s assets, showing a negative balance which progressively increased, which, in itself, sufficiently explained the illegal origin of the funds. In this context, therefore, the information provided by the [applicants], who, in an attempt to justify the origin of the assets subject to confiscation, have provided justification for each individual transaction ( dati economici della singola operazione ), is also irrelevant: the sector-specific evidence relating to the purchase of a single asset is completely irrelevant, given that the comparison between legitimately available resources and individual purchases cannot be carried out in an isolated manner, detached from the overall context of the financial transactions and movement of assets carried out within the same, limited period of time, but must be carried out in the light of an overall consideration of the movement of assets during the period at issue and of the overall destination of all the economic resources available.” RELEVANT LEGAL FRAMEWORK AND PRACTICE I.         RELEVANT DOMESTIC LAW 20 .     The relevant domestic provisions are enshrined in Legislative Decree no.   159 of 6   September 2011 ( Codice delle leggi antimafia e delle misure di prevenzione – Code of Anti-Mafia Laws and Preventive Measures). In particular, the “preventive confiscation” measure, provided for by Article   24, can be imposed on those individuals identified through the interplay between Articles 1, 4 and 16 of the Decree. Those provisions read as follows: Article 1: Addressees “1.     The measures provided for by the present provision may be applied to: (a)     individuals who, on the basis of factual evidence, may be regarded as habitual offenders; (b)     individuals who, on account of their behaviour and lifestyle and on the basis of factual evidence, may be regarded as habitually living, even in part, on the proceeds of crime; ...” Article 4: Addressees “1.     The measures provided for by the present provision may be applied to: ... (c)     the individuals indicated in Article 1; ... “ Article 16: Addressees “1.     The provisions of the present Chapter [concerning preventive seizure and confiscation measures] may be applied to: (a)     the individuals indicated in Article 4; ...” Article 24: Confiscation “1.     The court shall order the confiscation of the seized assets of which the person against whom the proceedings have been instituted ( proposto ) cannot justify the legitimate origin and of which, also through the intervention of a third party ( anche per interposta persona fisica o giuridica ), he or she is the owner or has at his or her disposal, in any capacity, in a value disproportionate to his or her income, as declared for income tax purposes, or to his or her economic activity, as well as of the assets which are the proceeds of unlawful activities or constitute the reuse thereof. In any event, the person in question cannot justify the legitimate origin of the assets by alleging that the money used to purchase them is the proceeds or reuse of tax evasion. ...” 21.     Individuals falling within one of the categories listed in Article 1 of Legislative Decree no. 159 of 2011 are considered to pose an “ordinary” danger to society ( pericolosità generica – see De Tommaso v. Italy [GC], no.   43395/09, § 43, 23 February 2017, referring to the possibility, under Law no. 1423 of 1956, of imposing preventive measures on individuals in certain cases of “ordinary dangerousness”; the relevant parts of that Law were incorporated, unamended, into Article 1 of Legislative Decree no. 159 of 2011). 22 .     Article 26 regulates the issue of ascertaining “fictitious ownership” ( intestazione fittizia ), allowing for the imposition of preventive confiscation measures on third parties, who are not considered to pose a danger to society, who officially own assets that are considered to be “at the disposal” ( nella disponibilità ) of the person in question, that is, the person directly concerned by a request to apply a preventive measure. It reads as follows: Article 26: Fictitious ownership “1.     Where the competent court finds that certain assets have been fictitiously registered in the name of or transferred to third parties, it shall declare in the decree ordering the confiscation that the relevant acts of disposition are null and void. 2.     For the purposes of paragraph 1, the following situations shall be presumed fictitious until proven otherwise: (a)     transfers and registrations, even for payment, effected in the two years preceding the proposal to apply the preventive measure, to ascendants, descendants, spouses or long-term partners [of the person in respect of whom the measure has been requested], as well as to relatives up to the sixth degree and relatives-in-law up to the fourth degree; (b)     transfers and registrations, whether free of charge or for a sum, made in the two years preceding the proposal to apply the preventive measure.” II.       DOMESTIC CASE-LAW A.    The nature and severity of the crimes justifying a person being declared a danger to society 23 .     In judgment no. 31209 of 17 July 2015, the Court of Cassation clarified the elements that had to be assessed in order to conclude that an individual could be qualified as someone who “on account of their behaviour and lifestyle and on the basis of factual evidence, may be regarded as habitually living, even in part, on the proceeds of crime”, within the meaning of Article 1 § 1 (b) of Decree no. 159/2011. The Court of Cassation held as follows: “Such qualification, which has to be made on the basis of appropriate factual elements (including reference to conduct and standard of living) requires the following conditions to be met: (a)     the commission of criminal activities (this is an unequivocal condition) in a non-occasional way and for a significant period of time during the life of the person against whom the proceedings have been instituted; (b)     the commission of criminal activities which, in addition to having the characteristic identified above, produce unlawful income (the profit); (c)     the at least partial allocation of such profit towards providing for the needs of the person against whom the proceedings have been instituted and his or her family. The contra legem activity (whether ascertained in correlated criminal proceedings or autonomously ascertained in the proceedings concerning a preventive measure) must therefore be characterised as a – recurrent – criminal offence which produces income.” 24 .     In judgment no. 24 of 27 February 2019, the Constitutional Court noted that, in the light of the relevant case-law of the Court of Cassation, the qualification of an individual as “habitually living, even in part, on the proceeds of crime” required a triple assessment. In particular, the Constitutional Court held as follows: “The ‘categories of offence’ that can serve as prerequisites for the measure are in effect likely to be established specifically within the present case under examination by the court in the light of the triple prerequisite – which must be proven on the basis of precise ‘factual findings’ that the court must substantiate precisely in its reasoning (Article   13   §   2 of the Constitution) – that the case must involve: (a) offences committed habitually (and thus over a significant period of time) by the individual, that (b)   effectively gave rise to a profit for himself/herself or another person, which (c) in turn represent – or represented at a particular moment in time – the individual’s only income, or at least a significant part of that income.” B.    The temporal correlation between the period when the individual in question posed a danger to society and the purchase of the assets to be confiscated 25 .     In judgment no. 4880 of 2 February 2015, the Combined Divisions of the Court of Cassation set out clearly the principle, which it had already been possible to infer from the pre-existing case-law, of the necessity of a temporal correlation between the period during which the addressee of the preventive confiscation measure was found to pose a danger to society and the purchase of the assets to be confiscated, which were considered to be “dangerous” since they had been acquired by an individual that, at the point of acquisition, had posed a danger to society on account of the presumed commission of criminal offences. In particular, the Court of Cassation held as follows: “Thus, in the case of unlawfully acquired assets, the character of dangerousness is linked not so much to the way in which they were acquired or to their particular structural characteristics, but rather to the subjective character of the individual who acquired them. This means that the purchaser’s dangerousness itself reverberates on the purchased assets, but once again not in a static way, that is to say, by the very fact of their subjective character, but rather in a dynamic projection, based on the principle of the objective dangerousness of keeping illegally acquired assets in the possession of those who are considered to belong – or have belonged – to one of the subjective categories envisaged by the legislature. The aforesaid reverberation ends up, then, by ‘objectifying itself’, translating itself into an objective attribute or special ‘character’ of the asset, capable of affecting its legal status. This is evident in the event of the death of the owner, already categorised as dangerous, or of formal transfer or fictitious registration ( intestazione fittizia ), given that the asset can, even in the possession of the successor in title, whether universal or particular, be subject to judicial attachment [that is, be confiscated]. In fact, it is evident that, in such circumstances, the confiscation to the detriment of heirs or apparent owners can no longer be justified by the relationship of pertinence between the res and the person in question ( proposto ), but only by reason of the objective ‘character’ of that asset, since it was, at the material time, acquired by an individual who posed a danger to society and, as such, was presumably the proceeds of a method of illegal acquisition. And, precisely because it has become ‘objectively dangerous’ (in the above-mentioned sense), by the same token it must be removed from the system of legal circulation. ... It is necessary, at this point, to deal with the correlated question of the necessity or otherwise of a chronological delimitation, that is whether there must be a temporal correlation between the acquisition of the assets and the manifestation of the danger to society [posed by the individual concerned]. In this regard, with reference to ordinary dangerousness, it is necessary to lay down the legal principle according to which only assets that have been acquired during the period of time during which the individual’s danger to society was manifested are capable of being confiscated, irrespective of whether the dangerousness persists at the moment when the proposal for application of the confiscation measure is lodged. Such a conclusion derives from the assessment of the same reason justifying the preventive confiscation measure, that is the reasonable presumption that the assets were acquired with the proceeds of unlawful activities (remaining, in this way, affected by a sort of genetic unlawfulness or, as it has been argued in the literature, by an ‘ontological pathology’) and is, accordingly, fully consistent with the reiterated preventive nature of the measure in question. By contrast, if it was possible to confiscate, indiscriminately, the assets of the individual in question, irrespective of the existence of any ‘relation of pertinence’ or temporal correlation with the danger to society posed by the individual, the measure would inevitably end up assuming the connotations of a real and proper penalty. Such a measure would therefore hardly be compatible with the constitutional parameters concerning the protection of economic initiative and private property, enshrined in Articles 41 and 42 of the Italian Constitution, as well as with the relevant Convention principles (in particular, with the principles in Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention). In the light of these principles, the confiscation of assets, deemed to be of unlawful origin, can be considered legitimate, as an expression of the proper exercise of the legislature’s discretionary power, only when it responds to the general interest of removing unlawfully acquired assets from economic circulation. On the other hand, it is obvious that the social function of private property can be fulfilled only on the immutable condition that its acquisition is in conformity with the rules of the legal system. Therefore, the contra legem acquisition of assets cannot be considered compatible with that function, so that an unlawful acquisition can never be relied on as an argument against the State ... Moreover, there is no doubt that the identification of a precise chronological context within which the power of confiscation may be exercised renders the exercise of the right of defence much easier, in addition to fulfilling an essential general safeguard. ...” 26.     In judgment no. 31634 of 27 June 2017, the Sixth Criminal Division of the Court of Cassation clarified that the person in question was allowed to provide evidence demonstrating that assets that had been acquired during the period in which he or she had been presumed to be committing criminal offences had actually been purchased using economic resources that pre ‑ dated the commission of unlawful activities and, accordingly, could not be confiscated. 27 .     In judgment no. 13375 of 22 March 2018, the First Criminal Division of the Court of Cassation clarified that the competent domestic courts could not substitute the assessment of the existence of a danger posed to society by the individual with the assessment of the lack of proportion between the individual’s lawful income and the acquired assets. This means that assets acquired outside the period in which the individual had been categorised as posing a danger to society could not be confiscated, irrespective of whether their value was disproportionate in respect to the individual’s lawful income. 28.     In judgment no. 14165 of 27 March 2018, the Second Criminal Division of the Court of Cassation confirmed the relevance of the principle of temporal correlation between the period in which the person in question had posed a danger to society and the acquisition of the assets to be confiscated (see also Court of Cassation, Second Criminal Division, judgment no. 30974 of 9 July 2018). The court held as follows: “... this court has had occasion to affirm the principle according to which the danger posed to society by the individual, in addition to being an essential condition for the preventive confiscation measure, is also a temporal parameter ( misura temporale ) for its scope of application, leading to the consequence that, with reference to so-called ordinary dangerousness, only assets that were acquired in the period of time in which the individual was categorised as posing a danger to society may be confiscated; with reference to the so-called ‘specific’ dangerousness, the competent court must ascertain whether this involves, as is ordinarily the case, the entire existential path of the person in question, or whether a start and end date of the period in which he or she posed a danger to society can be identified, with the purpose of establishing whether all the assets attributable to that person can be confiscated, or only those acquired during the above-mentioned period ...” The Court of Cassation further clarified that, in cases of persons who pose a “specific” danger to society ( pericolosità qualificata ), it was reasonable to presume that assets acquired immediately after the period in which the person in question had posed a danger to society had in fact been acquired through unlawful means accumulated during that period, provided that there were sufficient factual elements justifying such a conclusion (see also Court of Cassation, Fifth Criminal Division, judgment no. 1543 of 14 January 2021). In particular, the court held as follows: “Where the acquisitions take place in the period immediately following that in respect of which the ‘specific’ dangerousness of the individual has been ascertained and the competent court demonstrates the existence of multiple factual elements which clearly indicate that those acquisitions derive directly from means accumulated during the period of criminal activity, the confiscation measure can legitimately be applied, in so far as there is a logical correlation between the factual elements, the dangerousness of the addressee [of the measure], and the ‘unjustified’ asset increase that generated the asset subject to confiscation.” 29 .     The latter principle, which was developed in respect of cases of individuals who posed a “specific” danger to society, was extended to cases of individuals who posed an “ordinary” danger to society in judgment no. 12329 of 16 April 2020 of the First Criminal Division of the Court of Cassation. It argued that the principle of temporal correlation, while essential, should be read in the light of an “operative criterion which allows the upholding of the guarantee it enshrines without exposing it to unacceptable formalistic interpretations”. Accordingly, the Court of Cassation held that assets acquired after the period in which the person in question had posed a danger to society could be subjected to confiscation measures, provided that specific conditions and safeguards were respected. In particular, the court held as follows: “It is necessary, as regards assets that have been acquired outside the period in which the person in question posed a danger to society, to identify, on the basis of appropriate reasoning capable of demonstrating their significance, the factual elements capable of demonstrating that those assets derive directly from unlawful wealth which was previously accumulated [during the period when the individual posed a danger to society].” 30 .     This principle was further clarified in judgment no. 36421 of 7   October 2021 of the Sixth Criminal Division of the Court of Cassation, in which it was highlighted that those factual elements had to be more rigor