Analysis
UN ‘alarmed’ by Italian government’s security bill that puts ‘freedom of expression at risk’
UN experts are reiterating that the text contradicts Italy’s “obligations under international human rights law.”
A warning from the UN had already come in December, addressed to “Her Excellency” Giorgia Meloni, and gone unheeded. Since then, the Italian government has gone ahead at such a madly accelerated pace that it has definitively “alarmed” the UN.
Five UN Special Rapporteurs, who had already warned Rome about the critical issues of the Security Bill, have now “called on the Italian Government to rescind the decree adopted abruptly on 4 April to enact a security bill that was being discussed and criticised in the Senate, which includes provisions that are not aligned with international human rights law.”
Instead, the decree is being pushed forward on the road to conversion into law, with the start of the process on Wednesday in the Chamber's Constitutional Affairs and Justice committees, where a short round of hearings will be held after Easter.
“We are alarmed by how the government transformed the bill into an emergency decree that was swiftly approved by the Council of Ministers bypassing Parliament and public scrutiny,” the UN experts write.
They had already dealt with the issue on the merits on December 19, with a lengthy document pointing out the measures deemed as critically flawed in the Security Bill, article by article. Now, the UN is reiterating that the text contradicts Italy’s “obligations under international human rights law, including to protect the rights to freedom of movement, to privacy, to a fair trial, and to liberty, and to protect against arbitrary detention.”
With the Decree being in effect as of Saturday, “vague definitions and broad provisions related to terrorism that could lead to arbitrary enforcement” already have the force of law, as well as those that “put freedom of expression at risk” and could “disproportionately affect specific groups, including racial or ethnic minorities,” or the provisions that “appear to limit the ability for individuals … to assemble peacefully for protests and demonstrations,” with “vague phrasing” that “could result in arbitrary prosecutions.”
Among the provisions condemned by the UN is also the newly-introduced crime of rioting in prisons and migrant detention centers (Art. 26 and 27), also covering passive resistance and punishable by imprisonment of one to eight years. As the UN wrote in the December letter, this is an “unnecessary and disproportionate restriction of the right to peaceful protest” of detainees that could “inhibit reaching the lawful objectives of addressing security and guaranteeing reintegration processes.”
As we have already seen on Wednesday in Piacenza, these measures are so pointless that they hardly functioned a “deterrent” when some inmates started riots that ended within a few hours, with the recently established anti-riot units of the prison police having to intervene to quell the unrest and the initiators later transferred to other facilities.
Similar events took place on Sunday in Cassino. As Gennarino De Fazio from the penitentiary workers’ union UILPA denounced, “as soon as the crime of rioting came into force, tensions in prisons increased, and in four days there have been at least two serious situations of disorder that the prison police, increasingly exhausted in strength and mortified in morale, have had to deal with, not without difficulty.” To tell the truth, however, we have also been seeing a trend in the opposite direction: what were once considered simple protests, and handled as such, are now constantly – and almost daily – denounced by certain unions as “riots.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/lonu-scrive-a-meloni-abrogare-il-dl-sicurezza on 2025-04-16