Critics on Thursday condemned the Italian government’s plan to fingerprint Gypsy children as a discriminatory “ethnic head count” that insulted the country’s Roma population.
Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said the proposal, which would affect all Gypsies living in camps, would make it easier to identify child beggars.
He said the government also planned to make it easier to remove children from Roma parents who sent their offspring out to beg on the streets instead of to school.
But a senior opposition member, Rosy Bindi, said the plan presupposed that all Gypsy minors were criminals.
“This is a frankly unacceptable ethnic head count,” she said.
Vincenzo Spadafora, head of UNICEF in Italy, said he was “seriously concerned,” adding that the government would be acting in a discriminatory fashion “unless it fingerprinted every child in Italy.”
Silvio Berlusconi’s government is introducing a series of measures aimed at reducing crime, for which immigrants are increasingly being blamed — including thousands of Romanian Gypsies who have entered Italy since Romania joined the EU last year.
Politicians, including Maroni, a member of the anti-immigrant Northern League, have used increasingly strong language when discussing the issue.
A former head of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy warned the fingerprinting measure set a dangerous precedent.
“You start like this then you move on to the exclusion from schools, separated classes and widespread discrimination,” Amos Luzzatto told La Repubblica.
Recalling Italy’s fascist past, he added: “Italy is a country that has lost its memory.”
But Maroni insisted the scheme would “give greater guarantees to those who have the right to be here to live in decent conditions.”
Maroni said the fingerprinting would get under way this year, starting in Naples, Rome and Milan, as newly appointed Roma commissioners start carrying out a census of Italy’s roughly 150,000-strong Roma population. About 70,000 Gypsies are thought to have Italian passports.
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