New Bill on wire-tapping puts Italian journos in a bind

rome: A contested wire-tapping Bill in Italy risks landing journalists in jail for up to three years and could see mafia-related crimes go undetected, critics said.

The Bill, which was approved by the Cabinet this week and is waiting for the green light from the Prime Minister’s office, is a bid by the government to stop potentially incriminating but private conversations being splashed in the media.

“It will be the last rites for criminal trials,” warned Giulia Bongiorno, one of Italy’s most renowned lawyers.

Under the proposed law, police officers listening to wiretapped conversations will only be allowed to transcribe and pass on to prosecutors “relevant” bits. Any transcripts not used in trial would be sealed as “secret”.

Successive governments have attempted to change the law to protect against what former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in 2010 dubbed “porno politics”, where reputations are ruined and trials jeopardised before courts rule.

But each time their efforts have been stymied by police, prosecutors and the media, who say it would hobble investigations and limit journalists’ ability to report on matters of public interest.

Justice Minister Andrea Orlando said last Thursday the Bill would “in no way hamper the possibilities for prosecutors and police to use wiretaps as instruments in their investigations”.

But La Repubblica daily said on Sunday it would mean “six months to three years for the journalist who, doing his job, finds and publishes wiretaps that the prosecutor considers ‘irrelevant’ for trial, but are extremely relevant for their news value”.

“Publishing such transcripts will become extremely risky, with the real chance of ending up behind bars for revealing ‘secret’ wiretaps that the political sphere above all does not want to end up in the papers.”