Bartoli 'alarmed' by limitations on judicial reporting

(ANSA) - ROME, JAN 4 - Carlo Bartoli, president of Italy's National Order of Journalists, the sector's professional association, said Thursday that he shared concerns over an amendment to a law that would ban the publication of the contents of preventative-detention warrants.
    "There are some empty benches in this room: the (Italian journalists union) Fnsi has intended to desert theis conference in protest," said Bartoli at the opening of Premier Giorgia Meloni's end-of-year press conference organised by the National Order of Journalists and the parliamentary press association.
    It is a protest that in substance I share," he added.
    "We are alarmed by the approval of an amendment that risks lowering the curtain on information on judicial matters," continued Bartoli, calling for a "thorough rethink" of the libel reform under discussion in the Senate.
    The law proposal "does not seriously disincentivise reckless litigation and instead compresses citizens' right to free information," he said.
    Last week the Fnsi said that its top management would not attend Meloni's end-of-year press conference in protest against the amendment banning the publication of the contents of preventative-detention orders, claiming it is a "gag" that violates the right to report the news.
    The decision not to attend the press conference "is not a call to desert an institutional appointment that colleagues are invited to for work, but the beginning of the mobilisation that the journalists' union will put in place against measures that smack of censorship and to defend the dignity of the profession," read a statement.
    Fnsi Secretary General Alessandra Costante has descried the amendment as a "freedom-killing measure, not only with respect to article 21 of the Constitution (guaranteeing the freedom of expression and opinion, ed.), but also with respect to individual freedoms".
    "It is very dangerous not to know whether a person has been arrested or not," he said.
    "And it is not only dangerous for the freedom of the press, it is also dangerous for the recipient of the pre-trial detention order.
    "The memory of dictatorships, of the disappeared, of the people who vanish at the gates of Europe without anyone knowing anything about it, Alexei Navalny, for example, must raise our attention, including the attention of newspaper editors, who must join their journalist colleagues in this fight, and of the institutions," he said. (ANSA).