Brussels – The EU must closely monitor the protection of human rights in Italy. This is what the leaders of the Green and Left Alliance (AVS), Angelo Bonelli and Nicola Fratoianni, ask their fellow MEPs sitting in the Europarliament. With Security Bill 1236, they warn that the democratic right to peaceful dissent is repressed. With its adoption, Italy will move dangerously close to authoritarian models such as that of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
“We are here to denounce the ideological fury and ferocity of a right-wing that in Italy, in the name of a false security, is compressing and challenging civil and human rights.” Green Europe co-spokesperson Angelo Bonelli did not mince words in denouncing the “authoritarian drift” that the Security Bill, currently under discussion in the Italian Senate after its final approval by the House last September, is allegedly imparting on the country.
Therefore, he added this morning (Feb. 4) during a press conference at the European Parliament in Brussels, AVS supports the call of the National No Ddl Sicurezza network “to make sure that Italy is under special watch” within the Union. Since Giorgia Meloni‘s government took office, he said, “417 more years of imprisonment have been provided for in our Penal Code” due to the introduction of 48 new crimes. A worrying dynamic that “must concern Europe and make democracies react in a very determined manner to put the defence of civil and human rights at the centre.”
We are here to denounce the ideological ferocity of a right-wing that in Italy, in the name of false security, is reducing and challenging civil and human rights. We support the network #NoDdlSicurezza‘s call for Italy to be under special watch. pic.twitter.com/NLY5pjKiXg
– Angelo Bonelli (@AngeloBonelli1) February 4, 2025
Also along the same lines was the intervention of MEP Benedetta Scuderi, Bonelli’s party colleague (Greens/EFA in the Europarliament): “In Europe, we have already seen what happens when the rights of dissent and protest are not respected in a member state, as in Hungary,” she said referring to the erosion of democratic protections and the rule of law in the Central European nation ruled now for 15 years by the ultranationalist and pro-Russian prime minister Viktor Orbán. And today, he warned, Italy “faces the same risks because of a liberticide and authoritarian measure”. Therefore, he argued, it is Brussels’ task to “continue to protect democracy, protest, freedoms, and fundamental rights.”
According to the secretary of the Italian Left, Nicola Fratoianni, “the Security Bill operates first on the semantic terrain, excluding conflict and criminalizing all dissent, then proposes with concrete acts the goal of expelling any possible protagonism of civil society.” A position also expressed by MEP Mimmo Lucano (also elected with AVS, and a member of The Left group in Strasbourg), for whom the measure in question “strikes those who want to protest against an unjust world.”
The former mayor of Riace highlighted how Bill 1236 represents “one step further” than the infamous Security Decrees adopted between 2018 and 2019 by the Yellow-Green government at the instigation of then Interior Minister Matteo Salvini. While those specifically aimed “to dismantle the reception system of asylum seekers and penalise the work of those who gave them support,” the one currently under consideration in the Senate aims “to criminalise all forms of dissent.”
After all, it is not only opposition parties to the Meloni government that have pointed the finger at the severe criticalities in the measure’s 38 articles. After a slap on the wrist from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which as early as last May warned about the “potential to undermine the fundamental principles of criminal justice and the rule of law” of Bill 1236, in December came also the stop by the Council of Europe, the continental organization for the protection of human rights.
In a letter addressed to the senators of the Republic so that they would not pass the bill, Human Rights Commissioner Michael O’Flaherty recalled that “the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), are a cornerstone of democratic society” and that, if adopted, the Security Bill would “introduce offenses defined in vague terms” and create “room for arbitrary and disproportionate application of relevant punishments and restrictions,” which are judged “not compatible” with the democratic standards that European states should respect.
The Antigone Association defined the measure as “the greatest attack on freedom of protest in republican history,” while representing Amnesty International, Ilaria Masinara reiterated the need to counter the spread of a “European model of repression of protest” that labels as terrorists and criminals the peaceful demonstrations of dissent and civil disobedience. A model to which, he pointed out, governments resort under the guise of public order and security.
For Fratoianni, finally, the EU Parliament should also discuss another central issue in our domestic public debate: the case of the discharge of Libyan police commander Njeem Osama Almasri, on which a head-on clash is taking place not only between the majority and opposition but also between government and judiciary. “We would like this discussion to be opened up and there to be attention” beyond national borders, he explained, since it is “a European affair”. An affair that, Bonelli certified, “demolishes international law and human dignity.”
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
