Legal framework on religious freedom and actual application
Italian legislation on religious freedom guarantees freedom of religion or belief and recognises it as a fundamental right. Article 3 of the constitution expresses the principle of non-discrimination on religious grounds, stating that “all citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinion, personal and social conditions.”[1] Article 19 guarantees individuals their right to profess “their religious belief in any form, individually or with others, and to promote them”. It also allows them “to celebrate rites in public or in private, provided they are not offensive to public morality.” Article 8 stipulates that “all religious denominations are equally free before the law”.
Article 7 of the constitution asserts that the Italian state and the Catholic Church are independent and sovereign, and the 1929 Lateran Pacts[2] (amended in 1984)[3] govern their relations. The Italian government allows the Catholic Church to select teachers to provide religious education in state schools. In this regard, there is a proposal for a constitutional law under consideration, presented to the Chamber of Deputies in February 2022, which aims to abolish the Concordat included in the Lateran Pacts and to put the Catholic Church on the same level as other religious denominations. Under this proposal, relations between State and Church would be regulated by law on the basis of an agreement, as is already the case for other confessions.[4] Among the effects of this reform would also be the abolition of the Catholic religion hour in state schools.[5]
Relations between the state and other religions are regulated by law, based on agreements with their respective religious organisations. Before applying for an agreement, the religious organisation needs to be recognised as having legal personality by the Ministry of the Interior, in accordance with Law No. 1159/29.[6] The request is then submitted to the Office of the Prime Minister. An agreement grants religious ministers automatic access to state hospitals, prisons, and military barracks; it allows for the civil registration of religious marriages; it facilitates special religious practices regarding funerals; and it exempts students from school attendance on religious holidays. Any religious group without an agreement may also request these benefits from the Ministry of the Interior on a case-by-case basis. An agreement also allows a religious group to receive funds collected by the state through the so-called “Eight per thousand”, a compulsory deduction (of 0.8 percent) from taxpayers’ annual income tax.
Thirteen non-Catholic denominations have an agreement with the Italian state, while an agreement with Jehovah's Witnesses has been under negotiation since 1997.
At the beginning of 2022, based on an agreement stipulated three years earlier, the law regulating relations between the Italian State and the Church of England Association came into force. The Association represents the Anglican Communion in the country and for which the so-called law on “admitted cults” had applied until this date.[7]
An agreement has not yet been reached with the Islamic community, despite the fact that it represents the largest non-Christian group in Italy and that about one third of Italy’s immigrant population is Muslim.[8] The lack of an agreement stems from the absence of an officially recognised Islamic leadership with the power to negotiate an agreement with the government, and from the excessive fragmentation of the Islamic community (a recent survey identifies at least 255 associations, inspired by Islam, variously distributed throughout Italy).[9]
The Italian Ministry of the Interior has tried to manage Islam-related issues by creating a Council for Italian Islam in 2005, drafting a “Charter of Values of Citizenship and Integration” in 2007, and a “Declaration of Intent for a Federation of Italian Islam” in 2008. In 2016, the “Council for Relationship with Italian Islam” was established within the Interior Ministry, which in 2017 signed a “National Pact for an Italian Islam” with representatives of Italy’s main Muslim associations.[10]
In May 2022, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation appointed the diplomatic advisor Andrea Benzo as Special Envoy for the Protection of Religious Freedom and Interreligious Dialogue. Among his responsibilities is the promotion of initiatives aimed at strengthening commitment in favour of religious freedom in the sphere of Italy’s international relations.[11]
Incidents and developments
During the period under review, the Catholic community expressed concern about certain measures taken by the authorities that were perceived as conflicting with Christian values, even though in many cases these were moreover related to natural law.
After a heated debate that also involved Vatican diplomacy, the so-called Zan bill against homotransfobia was rejected in the Senate on 27 October 2021. The bill aimed to apply the “hate crime” legislation, which already punishes acts of violence and incitement to violence on grounds of ethnicity, nationality and religion, to homosexual or transgender people. The bill was considered a legislative instrument designed to restrict the freedom to publicly express traditional understandings of family and sexuality.[12]
On 15 February 2022, the Constitutional Court declared inadmissible the abrogative referendum on euthanasia, which aimed to decriminalise the participation in the death of a consenting person, regulated by Article 579 of the Criminal Code. According to the Court, the partial repeal of Article 579 would have deprived life of the minimum protections guaranteed by the Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights.[13] The Italian Bishops' Conference had expressed “grave concern” about the referendum.[14]
In March 2022, the “end of life” law was approved by the Chamber of Deputies. The text, at time of writing, under review by the Senate, excludes, under certain conditions, the penalisation of the doctor, healthcare personnel and anyone who participates in a medically assisted euthanasia.[15]
Following the acute phase of the pandemic where churches remained open only for private prayer, churches have been able to reopen since May 2020 provided they comply with the restrictions imposed by the government, which include: spacing between pews, compulsory use of protective masks, empty holy water fonts, and no exchanging of the sign of peace.[16] The restrictions resulted in a worrying drop in Church attendance and gravely impacted the freedom to express one’s religion or belief.[17]
The pandemic also affected the Islamic community, which suffered difficulties in guaranteeing a dignified burial for its dead, due to inadequate or insufficient cemetery spaces (out of 8,000 Italian municipalities, less than 100 have an area dedicated to burial in the Islamic rite) and the impossibility of repatriating the bodies of the deceased to their countries of origin. The emergency took on such dimensions as to lead the Italian Bishops’ Conference to disseminate pastoral suggestions in support of Islamic community.[18]
During the period under review, there was an increase in the number of incidents against Catholic property. On 23 March 2021, two small churches in the province of Pavia, were vandalised, painted with insulting phrases and blasphemies. At the end of August, a church in the province of Reggio Emilia was desecrated; vandals beheaded the statue of the Virgin and scattered Eucharistic hosts on the ground.[19] In November 2021, the Basilica of Santa Chiara in the historic centre of Naples was defaced with obscene writing.[20]
On the 1 April 2022, the Halls of the Kingdom of Jehovah's Witnesses were reopened to the public.[21] The religion was also at the centre of a dispute between two Italian parents in which the European Court of Human Rights intervened on 19 May 2022. A father, a convert to Jehovah's Witnesses, involved his daughter in the religious ceremonies of his new faith without the consent of her mother, a Catholic. The local court ruling case ordered the father to refrain from actively involving his daughter in religious activities. This decision was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg Court ruling that “the right to transmit and teach one’s religious beliefs to children must be guaranteed equally to both parents, even if they belong to different religious denominations”.[22]
During the reporting period, Muslims, the largest faith community after Catholics, set to represent 6.2 per cent of the total population by 2030,[23] complained of violence and discrimination.
In February 2022, a women's football match was suspended in Piedmont because a female player, originally from Morocco, was wearing the hijab.[24] In July 2022, a Muslim woman of Moroccan origin, and seven months pregnant, was attacked on a train in a station near Florence by a man who ripped off her burqa and then pushed her off the train together with her 11-year-old son.[25] Mainly Muslim women were victims of harassment, derogatory insults, and violence, often in public places, due to their clothing.[26]
According to Vox-Diritti, in the period between January to October 2021, Muslims were also the main target of online hatred, with significant peaks in the summer of 2021 following the return of the Taliban to Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers.[27] Among the hundreds of thousands of tweets, many were attacks on the Italian aid worker Silvia Romano. Ms. Romano, kidnapped in Kenya by Somali al-Shabaab jihadists in 2018 and freed after eighteen months in captivity, was criticised for her conversion to Islam.[28]
In 2021, the Anti-Semitism Observatory of the Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDEC) recorded a decrease - to 220 - in the number of antisemitic incidents compared to 230 in 2020 and 251 in 2019.[29] For 2022, partial figures speak of 184 incidents, but these figures, according to experts, are considered largely underestimated.[30] Incidents include physical assaults, death threats, vandalised synagogues, graffiti against the Holocaust, “stumbling stones” defaced with fascist slogans, anti-Semitic chants at stadiums, conspiratorial comments, and hate messages on social networks.
In September 2021, a Jewish tourist was attacked by a Pakistani street trader in Pisa. The attacker allegedly shouted, “hate Israel and Jews because they are all murderers.”[31]
In January 2022, a 12-year-old Jewish boy was first insulted and then kicked and spat on by two 15-year-old girls in a public park near Livorno. The episode occurred on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. During this same period, a survey was carried out on a sample group of 475 teenagers between the ages of 14 and 18, which revealed that 35 percent were unaware of what the Shoah is, with many of them thinking it was a “war from the Middle Ages.”[32]
Equally violent, during the period under review, were anti-Semitic attacks on the web and social media.[33] On 10 January 2021, during the presentation of an essay on the Shoah, dozens of antisemites “Zoom-bombed” a video conference waving swastikas and images of Hitler.[34]
In January 2022, the Prime Minister's Office published the National Strategy for Combating Anti-Semitism. The Strategy, accepting the IHRA's (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-Semitism, recommended that institutions adopt circumstantial policies to effectively counter the growing phenomena of intolerance and anti-Semitism.[35]
During the reporting period, Islamist extremist activities continued including the spread of radical propaganda on major social media.[36]
In June 2022, police arrested fourteen Pakistani citizens suspected of being part of a jihadist terrorist network and accused of spreading violent religious doctrines online.[37] Two weeks later, a Kosovar couple were arrested and accused of planning an Islamic State-inspired attack in Italy.[38] In October 2022, a man belonging to the US supremacist terrorist organisation, “The Base”, was arrested and charged with enlisting in international terrorism and spreading anti-Semitic, and neo-Nazi content online.[39] In November 2022, an Italian of Moroccan origin, an adherent of the Islamic State, was arrested by police on charges of kidnapping, torture and ill-treatment of persons who refused to fight for ISIS.[40]
Prospects for freedom of religion
Religious freedom and confessional pluralism are guaranteed by the Constitution and are protected as inalienable right. Positive signs acknowledging these rights in the period under review included the signing of a National Strategy for Combating Anti-Semitism, and the designation of the Special Envoy for the Protection of Religious Freedom and Interreligious Dialogue.
Despite this, a worrying persistence of religious freedom violations including violence, intolerance, and hate speech against all major faith groups was observed, as well as the ongoing lack of clear legal status for Islam and other minority confessions restricting access to benefits and social protections. Additional concerns of note included controversial legislative proposals such as the opaque “hate crime” legislation, and the removal of legal restraints protecting the vulnerable from euthanasia.
Although, in the period under review, there were no signs that the right to religious freedom is under immediate threat, tensions between the state and faith groups could increase should religious beliefs come into conflict with divisive laws. The prospects for religious freedom remain positive.
Italy