Constitution grew out of need to banish hatred - Mattarella

(ANSA) - ROME, AUG 25 - The Italian Constitution grew out of a need to overcome and banish hatred as the measure of human relations, President Sergio Mattarella said on Friday.
    "Human civilisation requires us to defeat that hatred in relations between people, by severely sanctioning their behaviour and thus creating the basis for the rules of our coexistence," Mattarella told his audience at the annual Meeting of Catholic evangelical organisation Communion and Liberation (CL) in Rimini.
    The president recalled how in the post-war Constituent Assembly "different opinions met in a spirit of sharing to affirm the values of dignity and equality of all people, of peace, of freedom".
    "This is how our Constitution was born: with friendship as a resource to draw on, in order to overcome barriers and obstacles together, to express our true humanity," he continued.
    Mattarella also warned against the use of "pretexts" to "stir up divisions".
    "There is never a shortage of pretexts for stirring up divisions, be it the invocation of ideological differences, ethnic characteristics, deceptive class struggles or the desire to revive anachronistic nationalism. What is happening on our European borders following the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation is a dramatic example of this," he said.
    (ANSA).