Italy - Silvio Berlusconi

Berlusconi cabinet toughens up on immigration

Wednesday 21 May 2008

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government approved a new set of strict laws against illegal immigration on Wednesday at the first full session of the cabinet, held in Naples to focus on the garbage crisis. Alexis Masciarelli reports.

NAPLES, Italy, May 21 (Reuters) - Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s cabinet approved tough new measures against illegal immigrants and crime on Wednesday despite concerns in the European Union that they could fuel racism.

“Citizens have a fundamental right not to be afraid. The right not to be afraid is a right that a state worthy of the name must guarantee,” said 71-year-old Berlusconi, who won a third term promising to fight crime widely blamed on immigrants.

Honouring a campaign promise to hold his first full cabinet meeting in Naples to highlight the trash crisis there, Italy’s new conservative premier vowed to act “exactly as if it were an emergency caused by a earthquake or volcano eruption”.

Berlusconi approved a decree opening new landfills which will now be considered military zones, giving the army powers to stop local residents from blocking roads and railway lines in protest against unwanted rubbish tips in their neighbourhoods.

Some people in Naples, where waist-high piles of rubbish  have been set on fire by locals fed up with local authorities’ inability to clear the streets, and the involvement of the local mafia or “Camorra”, were sceptical Berlusconi could help them.

“Coming to Naples was all about appearances,” said Rosaria Crispina, who runs a shop selling lottery tickets and cigarettes in a city topping the list of southern Italian areas most hit by organised crime, according to the Eurispes research institute.

Berlusconi also scrapped taxes on homes, overtime and productivity-related pay, and sought banks’ help to lower mortgage payments, in a bid to help the euro zone’s third largest economy avoid a looming recession.

EUROPEAN WARNINGS

Naples has been the focus of a violent backlash against illegal Roma camps depicted by right-wingers in Berlusconi’s new government as dens of criminality.

Police evacuated one camp after people set fire to shacks over news reports of an apparent attempted kidnapping of a baby by a Roma girl. Similar reports of an attempted baby-snatching surfaced in Sicily this week, with a young Roma couple arrested.

Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, from the anti-immigrant Northern League party allied to Berlusconi’s People of Freedom, told reporters after the cabinet meeting the new security laws would be rushed through parliament by the end of July.

They include making illegal immigration a jailable offence, which has outraged European human rights groups and politicians.

Property rented to illegal immigrants will be confiscated and it will be a jailable offence for adults to make children beg—a measure which appears to be aimed at Roma people, known in Italy as “nomads”.

The package makes it easier to expel illegal immigrants who fall foul of the law, check the income of immigrants from the EU and crack down on abuse of the asylum system to enter Italy.

Some measures were not aimed at immigrants, such as tougher laws for dealing with the mafia as well as for crimes targeting old people, women and the disabled and for drunk driving.

The Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, criticised the package, saying “arrests should be used against criminals, which immigrants are not”.

But Maroni said all the new measures respected EU norms.

“The accusations against us that have been made over the past few days are groundless,” he said.