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.
Sono passate ormai piu’ di 24 ore dai risultati elettorali, quindi potrebbe essere utile iniziare a trarre delle conclusioni sulla catastrofe elettorale della Sinistra.
1) Il risultato porta alla luce una realtà nascosta da troppo tempo, la debolezza di Rifondazione (e degli altri partiti di Sx) sul piano organizzativo, debolezza evidentissima ma da nessuno mai affrontata, anzi voluta dal vertice.
Here’s a sobering statistic… So far this year, an LGBT person has been killed every 8 days in the US. And those are just the ones we know about. That’s just so wrong…
Get angry. Get political. Make your friends understand.
This guy is so controversial… I really wonder if he is a populist, a socialist leader, or just a crazy politician. However his respect for the outcome of the referendum should vindicate his standing as a democratic leader.
There is no press freedom in Burma and the government has started turning off the Internet and other means of communication, so it is difficult to get news out. Individuals on the ground have been sending their day-by-day reports to the BBC, and they are heartbreaking. I encourage you to read these accounts to see for yourself what is really going on in Burma. Please include this link in your own blog post. (more…)
A number of protest groups made cases for their causes outside the United Nations. Marching to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza and protesting the war in Iraq, the Women Against Torture and the War Resisters League, accented their positions with with T-shirts, buttons and symbolic coffins.
FOR George Bush, the presidency is becoming a tragic tale of unintended consequences. In foreign policy, the man who sought to transform Iraq, the Middle East and America’s reputation has indeed had revolutionary effects, though not the ones he was aiming for. Now something similar seems to be happening in domestic politics. The most conservative president in recent history, a man who sought to turn his victories of 2000 and 2004 into a Republican hegemony, may well end up driving the Western world’s most impressive political machine off a cliff.
That machine has put Republicans in the White House in seven of the past ten contests. At times it has seemed as if the Democrats (oddly, given their status as the less Godly party) have had to rely on divine intervention to get elected. Watergate helped Jimmy Carter in 1976, just as the end of the cold war and Ross Perot’s disruptive third-party campaign helped Bill Clinton in 1992. (more…)
Maybe I am too naive, but it struck me that the World Bank concerns fighting diseases and providing health care a matter related to business and development and not human rights.
The report ‘Corporate Responses to HIV/AIDS‘ - released in July 2007 - says India’s private sector will gain considerably from supporting interventions aimed at preventing HIV both at the workplace and in local communities. The World Bank report, points out that that some of the hardest-hit countries with generalised epidemics may see their GDP growth reduced by about 2% or more annually.
Businesses have an enormous stake in the fight against the disease and, if left unchecked, it can rob them of their workers, their markets and their profits. Hence, they stand to gain from supporting interventions aimed at preventing the disease. The Report says that it’s a well-known fact that AIDS has a direct impact on a companies’ profits especially in countries where the disease is widespread. It results in greater absenteeism and staff turnover, higher recruitment and training costs, and higher costs in medical care or insurance coverage, and retirement funds.
