ITALY’S PRIME minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was last night facing a showdown with the US justice department over planned Italian legislation that would curb the freedom of investigators to bug telephone conversations.
Critics say the law is designed to shield Berlusconi’s government from further embarrassing revelations of the kind that have repeatedly discomfited the prime minister. He says it is designed to protect ordinary citizens who, because of the routine leaking of court documents, sometimes find intimate details of their private life splashed across the press.
Earlier this week the proposed law was nodded through committee in the Italian senate, and it is due to go before the full upper house of parliament next week. The measure was revived against the background of a mounting corruption scandal which this month forced the resignation of industry minister Claudio Scajola.
One of Italy’s leading organised crime prosecutors warned yesterday that neither the last “boss of bosses” of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, nor his predecessor, would be behind bars now if the measure had been in force earlier.
Antonio Ingroia, deputy chief anti-Mafia prosecutor of Palermo, told the daily La Repubblica: "The new law introduces obstacles that will prevent us from reaching to where we need to reach."
Adding his weight to a gathering revolt in Italy by judges, prosecutors, journalists and media proprietors, US assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer said in Rome: “We don’t want anything to occur that prevents the Italians from doing as good a job [in fighting organised crime] as they have in the past.” He added that existing rules on surveillance had been “extraordinarily helpful”.
A Bill to change them was approved by Italy’s cabinet in 2008, shortly after Berlusconi returned to power. But it became bogged down in parliament.
Under the draft law, the placing of wiretaps or listening devices would only be authorised if investigators had firm evidence a crime had been, or was being, committed. The surveillance would have to be approved by a panel of three judges, and last for 75 days.
Special authorisation would have to be granted for the bugging of lawmakers and priests. Media proprietors flouting the law would face fines of up to €465,000 and journalists would risk jail sentences of up to a month.
Some of Berlusconi’s followers, led by his increasingly mutinous former neo-fascist ally Gianfranco Fini, have expressed deep misgivings about the legislation. On Thursday, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Italia satellite network said the Bill represented “a serious attack on freedom”. – (Guardian service)