Tribunal of Imperia refuses to admit EncroChat evidence: French state secrecy prevents verification of filtering and parsing

By an order read at the hearing of 19 January 2026, the single judge of the Tribunal of Imperia refused to admit the EncroChat material that the prosecution had obtained from France by European Investigation Order and attributed to the defendant. A court-appointed expert had found that the data were stored data and that the content of the French disc could not be altered, but that the parsing process could not be examined because France invoked state secrecy. The expert could not establish whether the French report contained all data from the device, how filtering and dating had been done, or whether messages had been correctly attributed. The judge referred to the Joint Chambers of the Court of Cassation (nos. 23755 and 23756/2024) and to CJEU C-670/22 and held that the impossibility of verifying filtering and parsing prevents an effective review by the defence and amounts to a concrete violation of the rights of the defence.