After weeks of bitter argument, on No-vember 5th Italy's parliament passed a controversial bill to reform part of the penal code. Its likely effect is that a judges-bribing trial in Milan, in which Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's right-wing prime minister, and his close friend, Cesare Previti, are defendants, will drag on for years. So will two other judges-bribing trials in Milan, in which Mr Previti is a defendant and the verdict imminent. In one of these cases, Mr Berlusconi's companies were accused of being the source of money allegedly used to bribe the judges, but the charges against him were quashed last year under a statute of limitation. The likely effect, if the legislation goes through as planned, is that the cases will in the end be time-barred. The bill is not yet law: President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi has still to sign it. But most likely he will, and quickly. Last year, he signed another controversial bill, designed to render large parts of the prosecution's evidence in the judges-bribing cases inadmissible, within a day of parliament's final vote. This was much quicker than normal.
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