ALL ITALIANS TO BE FINGERPRINTED
July 16th, 2008Via: Reuters:
Italy may demand all its citizens be fingerprinted, a move aimed at defusing widespread criticism of government plans to force Roma people and their children to provide fingerprints as a way of tackling criminality.
That policy has been condemned by the European Parliament, by Romania, where many Roma come from, and by religious groups who have compared it to the tagging of Jews by Nazis and fascists in the 1930s.
A parliamentary committee agreed on Wednesday that from 2010 all identity cards, which Italians already have to carry, should include the fingerprints of the bearer. The measure still has to pass through parliament.
“It will defuse the Roma question, (fingerprints) will be taken from everyone,” opposition deputy Antonio Misani was quoted as saying by the Corriere della Sera newspaper’s website.
Conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi won a landslide at an April election on a promise to get tough on crime which many Italians blame on immigrants.
Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, a member of the staunchly anti-immigrant Northern League party, is pushing the measure to fingerprint people living in Roma camps. He has said only people who cannot provide valid identification will be fingerprinted.
Berlusconi has defended the policy, saying it would help the state clean up Roma camps, which are often squalid shanty towns on the outskirts of major cities. There are about 140,000 Roma in Italy, where they are known as “nomads”.
“The Italian government wants to guarantee Roma children can go to school and wants to integrate these European citizens,” Berlusconi said on Tuesday.
Commenting on the plan to fingerprint Roma, Italy’s privacy watchdog said it was “absolutely necessary to avoid recourse to techniques based on discriminatory criteria, especially if ethnic or religious” but said fingerprinting the whole population would not be discriminatory.
I could be wrong, but I believe this will make Italy the first G8 country to require fingerprints of all its citizens, though I think Germany requires it since 2006 for passport issuance. In the case of Italy, assuming Parliament approves it (nearly guaranteed), this measure will force *everyone* to get fingerprinted. The print will be stored on an IC chip in the ID card, and it already is mandatory for everyone in Italy to ‘carry their papers’ – you must possess&carry your national ID with you at all times, or face trouble at a police checkpoint.
Wow. I didn’t know this about Italy. There are checkpoints where police demand that people show ID cards???
Is that really true?
I would like to know more about these checkpoints. (For other readers: He’s writing from Italy, and has written from there in the past.)
In general, what is the public’s attitude toward this!?
Kev,
Not checkpoints as in fascist-style checkpoints, I mean checkpoints as in routine police checkpoints where they pull people over, make sure you got your Driver’s License, insurance paperwork, etc. Sometimes they’re looking for specific people (fugitives etc.), sometimes they’re looking for contraband in trucks, they might pull you over and test you for alcohol, so on and so forth. But they are pretty common in Italy, more so than in other countries, I think.
The law in Italy states that everyone must ‘show their papers’, it’s a fascist law that never got taken off the books from the Mussolini era. Not sure why they never got rid of it. If you’re just walking down the street, I’ve never heard of anyone being stopped and asked for ID, but the way the law is – yes, they can ask and yes you must show it – I’m not sure what the penalty is for not having your ID on you though. Having the national ID card (which is issued by your local town/city hall, at least for now it is) is mandatory for everyone, Italians and non Italians. They just don’t have fingerprints on them for now. At the moment, only non-EU foreigners, and criminals are fingerprinted.
As for the public, I don’t know yet – they just showed it on the news today and I haven’t gone out and talked to anyone about it yet, but obviously this news is huge. On one website, 73% of the people who voted in the poll supported the measure, which I find mind blowing. It might be that Italians have never known what it is to live in a free society, so they ‘accept’ this Orwellian crap? I don’t know for certain, but we shall see how this plays out. It’s scheduled for 1 Jan 2010, so we’ll see what happens.
As for the public attitude towards ID cards in general, to the best of my knowledge probably over 90% of the society accepts it as normal that you must have your papers, and show your papers, simply because this has been the way things are for many, many years and they probably just don’t know any better.
I had no idea that this type of thing A) was happening in Italy and B) was accepted as ‘normal’ by most people there.
Thank you for the information.
I wonder how common such checkpoints are in other European countries now?
In the late 1990s, I encountered a police checkpoint in a rural part of France, but I blew it off as a total one off fluke. They were checking driver’s licenses.
“Commenting on the plan to fingerprint Roma, Italy’s privacy watchdog said it was “absolutely necessary to avoid recourse to techniques based on discriminatory criteria, especially if ethnic or religious” but said fingerprinting the whole population would not be discriminatory.”
The end quote above, from the linked news item, is revealing. To fingerprint 140,000 people is discriminatory, but to fingerprint 58,000,000+ is not. By my figures, assuming a purely arithmetic ratio, it seems to me that’s about 414 times as discriminatory — as it now “fingers” every single minority in the country, as well as the majority. To what end, Duce?
FWIW, I’ve been in Germany since late 2002, and though I have yet to be pulled to the side by the Polizei personally, I have seen them set-up the occasional fishing expedition, as I prefer to call them. Keeping in mind that we are also rural, and in a border region with Belgium and Luxembourg.
However, I have been stopped twice by the Zoll (border patrol) crossing back into Germany from Belgium just a short distance from home, as we are but an hour by autobahn from Limburg province. These days they recognize me and I drive on by with a smile.
The first stop in particular is actually a funny story; best left for less public environs. Suffice it to say that I came away with flying colors, for several reasons, most of which only add to the humor and irony of the whole situation.
And then there’s my wife’s family and the fine generational tradition of smuggling goods across into Belgium — butter, pigs, eggs, etc. to trade for coffee, sugar, etc. — through two world wars.
Now and again I do wonder how long the old border stations between countries, many still shuttered and waiting quietly where they stand, will remain unmanned.