A fine must be paid or contested, an inspection requires documentation and a response, incorrect, manipulated or falsified administrative information requires a correction or rectification, a debt attributed to a citizen requires payment or an appeal, an accusation requires a defence, a decision requires acceptance, an appeal or a request for annulment.
Chief Prosecutor Marcello Viola and Public Prosecutor Francesca Crupi, of the Public Prosecutor’s Office at the Court of Milan, requested validation of the detention and pretrial detention in prison for Youssef Siher, an Italian citizen of Moroccan origin. On 28 October 2026, both requests were rejected.
Is it legitimate to ask how many similar measures requested by the two magistrates over the course of their professional careers have concerned citizens of Moroccan origin, people of the Muslim faith, or individuals belonging to both categories? And what were the outcomes of those requests?
Every procedure requires at least one action and may repeat its cycle or continue over time, until it becomes a presence that can progressively take over a person’s life, resurface during work and moments of rest, and continue to demand attention even when apparently nothing is happening.
The literature has documented, in various contexts, how legal and administrative procedures can be used to exert pressure, control or coercion against a target, and has described phenomena such as bureaucratic harassment, foot-dragging, legal systems abuse, paper abuse, post-separation abuse and SLAPP.
When the instrument used is a public institution, the cost is not borne solely by the person targeted: who pays for the time, personnel and resources employed to make these forms of abuse possible?
Regularity does not mean legality
Institutions exist to pursue public purposes: courts to ensure the administration of justice; administrative authorities, from municipalities to embassies, to perform functions in the common interest; oversight bodies to verify compliance with the rules. Procedures serve to establish facts, protect rights and make decisions.
On the one hand, initiating a procedure, or, on the other, knowingly allowing the initiation or continuation of a procedure based on false, unfounded or pretextual grounds may mean using a public function to persecute someone or pursue an unrelated purpose.
A public procedure cannot be used for just any purpose: it has a specific function, and its initiation and continuation presuppose conditions that justify it. The issue, therefore, concerns not only the regularity of individual acts, but the function that the procedure actually performs.
Article 7 of the European Code of Good Administrative Behaviour establishes that powers must be exercised exclusively for the purposes for which they have been conferred and not for purposes lacking a legal basis or not justified by the public interest. The fact that a procedure appears formally regular is therefore not sufficient to rule out abuse.
It is also from this perspective that the actions of Chief Prosecutor Marcello Viola and Public Prosecutor Francesca Crupi within the proceedings against Youssef Siher should be examined: not only by verifying the formal regularity of the acts, but also by questioning the purposes actually pursued and the proportionality of the judicial instruments used.
Bureaucratic harassment and foot-dragging
Stephanie Bonnes defines bureaucratic harassment as the intentional manipulation of legitimate administrative policies and procedures by people who hold institutional power over others, with the aim of harming them. In her study of administrative tools of harm, she shows how ordinary administrative procedures themselves can become instruments of harassment.
The OECD includes, among the indicators useful for identifying corruption, the time spent interacting with public officials and also links disproportionately long timeframes to bureaucratic harassment and foot-dragging aimed at soliciting bribes or engaging in extortion. The OECD also considers the time, steps and costs required to access information and documents, variations in tax assessments and revenue collection, as well as the frequency of and variations in inspections, linking anomalous values to the risk of corruption, extortion and favouritism.
Duration, frequency, burdens, repetition and cumulative effects can therefore contribute to assessing the actual function and purpose of a procedure.
Distribution of responsibility
The fragmentation of a procedure can distribute responsibility and make it more difficult to identify who devised, coordinated or knowingly contributed to a particular abuse. Even people who are unaware of it can, through a single legitimate act, become part of the mechanism that makes the abuse possible.
In an interconnected European administrative and judicial system, a procedure initiated in one State may require the cooperation of officials from other States for information, checks or acts, without those officials knowing the context in which their cooperation is being used. An official may, for example, correctly communicate an address or confirm information that, without their knowledge, is subsequently used to support a falsified or manipulated representation of the procedure in another country. These mechanisms can therefore extend beyond national borders.
How the procedure itself can be the intended outcome
Studying the operation of lower-level criminal courts in the United States, Malcolm Feeley arrived in 1979 at the formulation the process is the punishment: court appearances, waiting, loss of time and income, practical difficulties and other costs can burden a person before and independently of the final decision.
When a procedure occupies years of a person’s life, uncertainty does not remain confined to the procedure but extends to the decisions that must be made in the meantime. Depending on age, circumstances, physical and psychological conditions and available resources, ten years can mean a simple delay or the loss of opportunities associated with a particular stage of life: starting a career, investing in a project, building a romantic relationship or a family, having children.
A person may therefore obtain a fully favourable decision and still have paid a price along the way: it is in this sense that the process itself can constitute the punishment.
In the case of Youssef Siher, who will be held accountable for the trauma caused by a deprivation of personal liberty that did not receive judicial validation? Who will be held accountable for the psychological consequences, the damage to his reputation and any opportunities potentially lost, including as a result of the public criminalisation fuelled by politicians, newspapers and journalists aligned with the political right?
Legal systems abuse, paper abuse, post-separation abuse and family court
If conflict has a cost, that cost can be used as an instrument of power. Heather Douglas documents in Legal Systems Abuse and Coercive Control, through interviews with 65 women, how the judicial system can prolong an ex-partner’s coercive control after separation, offering perpetrators of abuse the opportunity to continue and even expand their repertoire of coercive and controlling behaviours. Susan L. Miller and Nicole L. Smolter define paper abuse as the use of repeated unfounded legal actions, false reports and other manipulations of the system for the purpose of exercising power, maintaining contact and imposing financial costs.
A concept analysis of post-separation abuse also identifies isolation and discrediting: strategies aimed at discrediting the victim, raising doubts about their credibility or suitability, and damaging their relationships and support networks.
A systematic review of 48 studies from the United States and Canada identifies legal abuse as a form of post-separation abuse and documents false accusations, distortion of information, attribution of responsibility to the victim, concealment of evidence of abuse and public humiliation. It also documents the involvement of third parties and professionals within the judicial system in harassment and denigration, even when they are unaware of the perpetrator’s tactics, and identifies the family court as the principal judicial context of post-separation abuse.
SLAPP
In 1988, George W. Pring and Penelope Canan identified a specific form of pretextual or instrumental litigation — lawsuits directed against individuals or organisations in connection with their public participation in matters of public interest — and coined the acronym SLAPP, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.
Recommendation CM/Rec(2024)2 of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe defines SLAPPs as legal actions threatened, initiated or continued for the purpose of harassing or intimidating the target and preventing, restricting or punishing their public participation. The Council of Europe also observes that the primary purpose is not necessarily to win the case, but to impose costs, expenditure of time and stress on the defendant in defending themselves.
Bureaucratic harassment, foot-dragging, legal systems abuse, paper abuse, post-separation abuse and SLAPP describe different phenomena that share the fact that the costs imposed by the procedure can become part of the intended outcome, if not the outcome itself.
Private interests and public functions
The European Commission commonly defines corruption as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain and observes that it can also be concealed behind favouritism, nepotism, conflicts of interest and revolving doors.
The OECD, however, distinguishes between conflicts of interest and corruption: when private interests may potentially improperly influence the exercise of a public official’s duties, a conflict of interest exists; when they have actually compromised the exercise of those duties, the situation may be classified as misconduct, abuse of office or, in certain circumstances, corruption. According to the OECD, private interests are not solely financial or economic and do not necessarily involve a direct personal benefit: they may include private activities, affiliations, personal relationships and family interests.
The issue, therefore, is not merely whether a private interest exists, but whether it has compromised the proper exercise of a public function.
Are public resources only money?
The abuse of public resources is generally associated with money: misappropriation of funds, falsification of documents to obtain payments that are not due, or the use of public funds for private interests. But public funding also takes the form of personnel, working hours, professional expertise, infrastructure, information systems, administrative structures and operational capacity.
The European Commission requires sound and effective management of the resources entrusted by taxpayers, capable of producing results. Every procedure uses such resources: checks and investigations can occupy officials, structures and systems for months or years. If the procedure pursues its public purpose, this is the normal functioning of institutions; if it pursues a private purpose, it is not.
The OECD, noting the absence of a universal legal definition of fraud, reports a definition of internal fraud that includes the intentional abuse, by an employee, of the organisation’s resources, revenues, information, assets or authority for the purpose of enriching themselves or third parties; the OECD also refers to fraud as deliberate deception intended to obtain a personal benefit or cause a loss to others.
Who pays for the abuse of public resources?
The time an official devotes to one procedure cannot be devoted to another. Administrative capacity absorbed by a dispute is not available for other activities, procedures or citizens.
The instrumental use of a procedure can therefore impose a cost on the community without a single euro being taken from public coffers: if resources financed by the community are knowingly used for a private or unlawful purpose, it is the community that bears the cost.
We rightly believe that those who intentionally cause harm should be held responsible for it, and we consider the abuse of a private resource to be serious.
Should those who abuse public resources to persecute a target or pursue private interests not also pay for the harm caused to the community and reimburse the community for the public resources that were used?
