Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi defended his center-right government’s hardline immigration policy on Tuesday as tough new measures passed a first hurdle in parliament.
Berlusconi, who won elections in April in coalition with the anti-immigration Northern League, said Italy had a “benevolent” attitude toward immigrants but “must turn away [foreigners] who come to Italy to commit crimes.”
He spoke after UN independent experts slammed the administration’s moves to fingerprint gypsies, or Roma — a policy the European Parliament said last week would clearly be discriminatory.
Italy’s lower house of parliament on Tuesday approved by a wide margin tough new legislation to make illegal immigration a custodial offense punishable by between six months and four years in prison. The measures would facilitate deportation and extend the allowable detention of suspected illegal immigrants from two to 18 months.
In addition, non-Italians convicted of crimes would face penalties one-third stiffer than those handed down to Italians.
The Senate is expected to approve the measures — which are opposed by the left, Catholic formations, human-rights groups and some EU bodies — next week.
Italy’s policy towards immigrants — notably ethnic Romanians, many of them Roma — has come under intense scrutiny since Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, a Northern League member, said last month that security forces would fingerprint gypsies.
While gypsies have been fingerprinted in Milan and Naples, authorities in Rome are opposed to the policy and will not fingerprint Roma in and around the capital in a census to begin this week, ANSA news agency reported.
UN special rapporteur on racism, Doudou Diene, said on Tuesday that he was “extremely concerned” about the measures.
“By exclusively targeting the Roma minority, this proposal could be unambiguously classified as discriminatory,” Diene said in a statement.
The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Italy was to meet Maroni yesterday to discuss the rights of foreign children and adolescents, its local chief Vincenzo Spadafora told ANSA. UNICEF was to give Maroni a document drafted by more than 30 associations at a roundtable on the issue.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Two daughters of an Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences. Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas. Last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44. Last month, the three set out with four other guides
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
DISASTROUS VISIT: The talks in Saudi Arabia come after an altercation at the White House that led to the Ukrainian president leaving without signing a minerals deal Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was due to arrive in Saudi Arabia yesterday, a day ahead of crucial talks between Ukrainian and US officials on ending the war with Russia. Highly anticipated negotiations today on resolving the three-year conflict would see US and Ukrainian officials meet for the first time since Zelenskiy’s disastrous White House visit last month. Zelenskiy yesterday said that he would meet Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the nation’s de facto leader, after which his team “will stay for a meeting on Tuesday with the American team.” At the talks in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah, US
RSS