Around 80,000 gipsy children are to be fingerprinted by the Italian authorities under a new scheme that has drawn comparisons to the policies of Benito Mussolini.

The Italian government has blamed immigrants, and particularly Roma gipsies, for the country’s crime problems.

Since Silvio Berlusconi became prime minister in April, gypsy camps in the south and north of the country have been burned by vigilante mobs.

The home minister, Roberto Maroni, has now announced that all the Roma will be fingerprinted, including children. “This is not ethnic cataloguing, this is the ultimate safeguard of their rights,” he said.

Article continuesadvertisement “We will take the children’s fingerprints in order to stop those occasions when parents send their children out to beg. It is a proper census to make sure that those who have the right to stay here can live in decent conditions,” he said.

According to the latest figures, there are 160,000 Roma gipsies in Italy, almost half of whom have Italian citizenship. The last census recorded that 80,000 of them are children.

The move has triggered memories of the segregation of Jews imposed by Benito Mussolini in 1938. “I remember when I could not go to school with the others,” said Amos Luzzatto, a former president of Italy’s Union of Jewish Communities.

“There is a latent racism in Italian culture and it manifests itself cyclically,” he added. “Taking the fingerprints of youngsters from one ethnic group implies that you consider them to be congenital thieves.”

Unicef, the United Nation’s children’s rights body, said it was “shocked and deeply worried” by the plans.

(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk