JUSTICE FOR ALL acter that is also reaffirmed by the system of waiting lists. These prevent overcrowding and also prevent the misuse or overuse of a measure that should maintain a residual character. This is the first time that a 'numerus clausus' is introduced in the Italian penal system. A principle as banal as it is revolutionary, the number of guests in REMS can never exceed the maximum capacity and therefore REMS cannot be 'overcrowded'. This has resulted in a 'waiting list' of people waiting to be admitted to REMS. The most critical cases are those who are waiting in prison, as in the case of Giacomo Sy, who chose to file an appeal to the ECtHR, highlighted above. In 2017, all OPGs were closed; the inmates who had been confined there until then followed different paths: some entered the REMS, others returned to freedom after years, not without some difficulties due also to the long removal from the free society and the difficulties of the territorial social services. The OPGs were replaced by a set of health and social services offered in the community. The right to health, which by the Constitution must be ensured regardless of a person's legal status to all individuals, was thus placed on a formal level in a position of precedence over the right to security - albeit balanced with this. The person recognised as not being fit to be found criminally responsible, accused or found to have committed a crime, was no longer to be simply interned but was to be granted the right to be cared for and treated. The system of care designed for this purpose was to be centred on the community and on a plurality of interventions of which the REMS were to represent the extrema ratio. In 2017, the Superior Council of the Magistracy expressed itself on the issue as follows: ‘The reform, therefore, has placed at the centre of the new system the Departments of Mental Health, which have become the owners of the therapeutic and rehabilitative programmes for the purpose of implementing, as a rule, treatment in territorial and residential contexts. The REMS are, therefore, only one element of the complex system of treatment and rehabilitation of psychiatric offenders'. While the idea might be that all difficulties have been overcome since then, this has not been the case. The economic crisis led to a major reduction in the resources allocated to health and mental health in particular. All the scaffolding that had represented the abolition of the OPGs, instead of being strengthened, was to some extent neglected since then. At the end of 2021, the two Ministries involved in the matter, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Justice, decided to reconstitute a Coordination Body chaired by Professor Nerina Dirindin. The objective prescribed for the body was to understand, in the Regions with the most critical issues, what measures to take, especially in light of the Constitutional Court's preliminary order no. 131 of 2021 in which the Court formulated questions submitted to all the different institutions involved in the management of intellectual or psychosocial disabilities within the criminal justice system: the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Health and the Conference of the Regions and Autonomous Provinces. These three institutions delivered to the Constitutional Court ‘a single comprehensive report, prepared jointly’, which has already been presented above. Quotes of the report were published in the subsequent Court’s judgement No. 22 of 27 January 2022 and contain valuable information that will be reported here, also because it is often the only source of information and numerical data on the subject. As of 31 July 2021, there were 36 active REMS in the country. At that date, the REMS housed 596 people against an official capacity of 652 places; it must be noted that a waiting list system is active in the REMS and that therefore the negative difference in admissions was linked to the needs of that particular moment, which coincided with the pandemic. The report highlighted a discrepancy in the information on the so-called waiting Lists for placement in REMS to the 125