It is quite independent in Italy actually. The government is pushing for a constitutional amendment to help "fix" this feature. There is going to be a referendum on the change very soon.
Ask any Romanian and they'll tell you they're not. Ask them about the Mario Iorgulescu case [1], with the Italian justice system refusing to extradite him here to Romania only because his (wealthy) dad paid the right people off. And Iorgulescu is not the only such case.
the current reform is complicated, and reasonable people can disagree on how to vote, but it goes a bit further than separating prosecutors from judges.
Namely, it also changes the self-regulating body (the CSM, Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura) of the judiciary so that the government and parliament have a bit more authority and the judiciary have a bit less: the organ is split in two, its judiciary members are no longer elected but picked randomly while a part is decided by the political side, and there's an even higher special tribunal.
Proponents say this is necessary, opponents say this is leading towards stronger power of the political majority over the judiciary.
Now, roughly one third of CSM members is nominated by the Parliament and the other one is elected by judges, according to the "correnti" (a sort of parties)
> The government is pushing for a constitutional amendment to help "fix" this feature. There is going to be a referendum on the change very soon.
Italian here.
It's not like that: the referendum is about definitely enforcing the career separation about public persecutor and judges.
Actually they are under the same authority and the member of this authority are elected according to a sort of political parties (unique case in the whole EU) and this creates some distortions in career growths and nominations.
The new schema will create two different authorities and the members will be selected according to a ballot.
A similar proposal was made by the left wing parties few years ago, when they were at the government
