New law gives Silvio Berlusconi immunity from prosecution

The Italian Cabinet has adopted a law granting immunity from prosecution to the country's top four officials, including Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister.

The law was expected to be approved by Parliament by the end of July, before the summer recess. Mr Berlusconi has a comfortable majority in both the Senate and the Lower House.

In another move seen as benefiting Mr Berlusconi, the Senate this week passed a law allowing those accused in "non-priority" offences to ask for their trials to be suspended for a year. In theory, Mr Berlusconi could use this measure to freeze a corruption trial in Milan in which he is a defendant, together with David Mills, the estranged husband of Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister.

Mr Berlusconi has said that he does not intend to make use of the law, which he claims is intended to clear a backlog of trials and speed up Italy's notoriously inefficient judicial system. However if the law giving him immunity from prosecution is passed next month as expected, his corruption trial in Milan would be halted in any case.

The "offices of state" to be made immune from prosecution are President (head of state), Prime Minister, Speaker of the Senate and Speaker of the Lower House.

Antonio Di Pietro, the former anti-corruption magistrate and leader of the opposition Italy of Values party, said that it was "no coincidence" that Mr Berlusconi was putting through measures to save himself from prosecution just as the Milan trial was about to reach a verdict. He is accused of arranging a $600,000 (£300,000) bribe to Mr Mills in return for misleading evidence in earlier corruption trials in the 1990s. Both men deny the charge.

Since returning to power in May, Mr Berlusconi has tabled a series of law and order measures that he says are intended to fight crime but which critics say are also designed to help him evade prosecution. This week he launched an intemperate attack on "left-wing" magistrates as a "cancerous growth" in Italian democracy which even some of his closest aides were reported to have described as ill judged and counter productive.

He has also introduced a Bill restricting magistrates' use of telephone intercepts. Phone taps will continue to be used for crimes involving terrorism, political corruption or the Mafia, but not in cases where the maximum prison sentence for the alleged offence is less than ten years. Journalists who publish the transcripts will face fines and up to three years' imprisonment. Italian newspapers frequently reprint leaked transcripts of conversations overheard by the police.

Today L'Espresso magazine published transcripts of intercepted phone conversations from an investigation by Naples magistrates into allegations that last year, when he was leader of the Opposition, Mr Berlusconi asked a senior executive with RAI, the state broadcasting company, to give jobs in soap operas and variety shows to named actresses and starlets as a favour. In one transcript Mr Berlusconi is heard interceding for an actress who "hated" him because he had so far failed to find her a part and was becoming "dangerous".

Magistrates allege that the women were the wives or girlfriends of politicians whom Mr Berlusconi was trying to persuade to abandon Romano Prodi, then the centre-left prime minister, who had a wafer-thin Parliamentary majority.

Defenders of telephone intercepts say that they have been vital in helping Italian police not only to monitor Islamic and Red Brigades terrorists and the Mafia but also to uncover hospital scams, the match-fixing scandal in the Italian football league and financial fraud.

Angelino Alfano, the Justice Minister, said that the use of intercepts had "degenerated, because people's privacy was being violated too often. The text we approved is very balanced and combines a guarantee of privacy for the citizen with the state's crime-fighting needs."

The Bill as first drafted excluded political corruption from the list of offences for which phone taps could be used, but it was inserted by the Northern League, which forms part of the Berlusconi coalition.

Another part of the "security package" also came under fire today, as civil rights groups attacked plans to fingerprint Roma children in Italy as part of the crackdown on crime, describing it as racist.

Roberto Maroni, the Interior Minister and a leader of the Northern League, said that a census of Roma Gypsies would "guarantee that those who have the right to stay can live in decent conditions and let us send home those who don't have the right to stay". He said the census would mean fingerprinting everyone in the camps — "children, too, to avoid phenomena like begging".

"It will not be an ethnic register but will provide further guarantees for their rights," Mr Maroni said. Police visiting gypsy camps for the census would be accompanied by officials of the Italian Red Cross. The UN Children's Fund (Unicef) joined centre-left politicians in criticising the proposal as an "ethnic register" that would "treat Roma children as if they were hardened criminals",

Roma are widely blamed for rising crime. Some gypsy camps have been raided by police while others have been attacked and burnt by vigilantes. Amos Luzzatto, the former president of Italy's Union of Jewish Communities, said that the measure was reminiscent of the persecution of the Jews in Europe before and during the Second World War, "which we seem to have forgotten".

Richard Owen, in Rome