New Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni has criminalizes unlicensed rave parties, attaching a hefty punishment to it.
The new crime of “invasion for dangerous gatherings” of more than 50 people would attract up to six years in jail and opens up the possibility of wiretapping rave organisers.
Both the political opposition and judicial magistrates voiced alarm the tough law-and-order stance signaled the government’s possible intolerance of disobedience.
A thousand ravers were ordered to leave a warehouse rave in Modena on Monday.
Residents had complained of 48 hours of non-stop techno music at the Halloween party that attracted young ravers via social media from nearby Italian cities as well as Belgium and France.
The ravers had planned to stay until Tuesday but left the disused warehouse in northern Modena without trouble and witnesses said they tidied up behind them.
Critics noted that no action was taken against the weekend march by several thousand Mussolini admirers wearing Fascist symbols and singing colonial-era hymns in Predappio, the late dictator’s birth and burial place, while the government in Rome took extraordinary action to break up the rave party in the northern city of Modena.
Meloni’s government is the first led by a party with neo-fascist roots since Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship was ousted during World War II, ending a disastrous and murderous alliance with Hitler’s Germany.
The decree, which still must be debated and approved by parliament to become law, would make the organizers of unauthorized gatherings of more than 50 people in public or private settings eligible for prosecution and prison terms of up to six years.
Prime Minister Meloni argued the new law aimed to protect people from harm and was no different from elsewhere in Europe – but it would signal that the Italian state was no longer lax in respecting the rules.
Italy’s Constitution allows limits on the right to assembly “only for proven reasons of public safety and security,” and does not discuss threats to order or public health – the rationales cited in the decree, Giovanni Maria Flick, a former president of Italy’s constitutional court, told daily newspaper La Repubblica.
