Among Western Europe’s democracies, Italy makes
the most use of wiretaps-more than 100,000 times a year. As the use of wiretaps
has quadrupled since 2001, the cost of listening and documenting the
conversations has grown exponentially. At 220 million euro annually, it now amounts
to roughly a third of the Justice Ministry’s budget. Not only are there are so many wiretap transcripts, but journalists have
easy access to them. Italian dailies often publish excerpts, usually those
involving celebrities and politicians. Heavy and costly reliance on bugging
techniques in police investigations has spurred the majority government to
reform Italy’s current wiretapping legislation. The country’s centre-right
administration recently forged ahead with a highly contested measure that would
restrict wiretapping to serious criminal cases that could result in punishments
of 10 years or more, and investigations of organized crime and terrorism.
The draft bill would limit phone
taps to a period of three months and require authorization by a panel of
magistrates. Those who conduct unauthorized wiretaps or publish transcripts
would face a possible five-year prison term.
Although the idea to reform the
wiretapping law received backing from Italian president Giorgio Napolitano,
scores of magistrates, journalists and opposition leaders have fiercely
contested the proposed changes. The head of Italy’s journalists’ union, Roberto
Natale, reiterated journalists’ criticism to the plan: ‘We’re absolutely
against a wiretapping bill. Privacy rights have nothing to do with it. What’s
at stake is the taxpayers’ right to be informed’. Journalists are threatening
to strike against the measure.
The head of the opposition Italy
of Values party Antonio Di Pietro, a former prosecutor in the 1990s Clean Hands
probes into political corruption, said Berlusconi’s proposal was ‘very
serious’. Not allowing the publication of transcripts was ‘like holding a trial
behind closed doors’, thereby preventing the media from informing the public
about important investigations.
The measure would also ‘greatly
reduce prosecutors’ ability to probe into crimes involving pedophilia, graft,
corruption, financial crimes, usury, extortion and a lot of other criminal
activity, he added.
