By judgment no. 22 of 22 February 2024, Corte Costituzionale declared the constitutional unlawfulness of Art. 2(1) of Legislative Decree no. 23/2015, insofar as it limited the recognition of reinstatement protection to only those cases of nullity of dismissal ‘explicitly provided for by law’.

The Court condemned this limitation as a violation of the delegation criterion set out in Art. 1(7)(c) of Law No. 183/2014, which recognises the employee's right to reinstatement in the workplace 'in cases of nullity of dismissal, without distinction'. For the Court, the textual reference to 'null dismissals’ did not provide for, and therefore did not allow, the legislature to distinguish between explicit and non-explicit nullity.

Moreover, ‘by providing for reinstatement protection only in cases of explicit nullity, the legislator has left the excluded cases, namely those of dismissals that are null and void for breach of mandatory rules but without the explicit sanction of nullity, without any specific discipline, thus imposing an incomplete and inconsistent discipline with respect to the design of the delegating legislator’.

In the light of the declaration of constitutional unlawfulness, the regime of null and void dismissals appears to be the same ‘regardless of whether the mandatory provision violated contains the explicit sanction of nullity or whether it is not textually provided for (...)’.