'A New Crime Is Born': Italy's Security Package Meets Its Lawyers

Italy has approved tough new security measures aimed at containing the wave of protests over wages, the cost of living and public services, The Local Italy reported this week. The package is described in the paper's headline as the birth of a new crime, and lawyers it quotes call the approach myopic.

The measures follow a month of demonstrations in which foreign wires have recorded clashes in Rome and raids on homes in Milan. Euronews reported young protesters confronting police in the capital on a Saturday of nationwide marches, and the Guardian's live coverage noted Italian officers searching addresses in Milan on the same weekend.

The significance of the legal change, as The Local Italy frames it, is that it creates an offence where none existed, giving prosecutors a new instrument against conduct connected to protest. The paper's legal sources argue that the instrument is blunt: it responds to the visible disorder of a march rather than to the conditions that brought people onto the street. That is a criticism of method, not of the diagnosis.

The timing is instructive. The new measures arrive as the protest movement has shown itself to be organised through online networks with no party and no union at their head, a structure The Local Italy examined in a separate analysis this week. A movement without formal leadership is difficult to negotiate with and, by the same token, difficult to charge. A new offence aimed at individuals may therefore do less to calm the streets than its authors expect.

The government's own framing, as reported, is one of public order. The Local Italy's roundups this week record the arrest of nine people in connection with the protests and the deployment of drones and helicopters to monitor the marches. The security apparatus is being built out at the same time as the legal one, and the two are presented as a single response.

For the South, the wire offers no direct regional detail, and none should be invented. The Local Italy's reporting on the security package is national in scope. The truckers' blockade that paralysed southern Italy for a week ended on Friday after fuel aid, according to The Local Italy, and the last picket lines came down in Campania. Whether the new measures are meant to reach that kind of action, or only the urban marches, the paper does not say.

The comparison worth keeping in view is with the rest of Europe. The Guardian reported that French police made around a thousand arrests during the same weekend of demonstrations, and that protests also took place in Spain and Albania. Italy's new offence is therefore one national answer to a continental season of discontent, and lawyers quoted by The Local Italy think it is the wrong one.

What happens next will be measured in courtrooms rather than squares. If the new offence is used sparingly, the criticism may fade. If it is used broadly against people who were on the street rather than people who broke something, the lawyers' word, myopic, will be quoted back at the government by foreign correspondents for the rest of the autumn.