As Italy on Wednesday marked the 70th anniversary of the deportation of Jews from Rome’s ghetto to Auschwitz, Holocaust denial is to become a crime in the country.
According to the Italian news agency ANSA, members of the Senate from across the political spectrum introduced an amendment to Italy's criminal code that would make denying the Holocaust a crime.
The amendment was signed by politicians from the center-left Democratic Party (PD), the center-right People of Freedom Party (PdL), the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) and other smaller parties.
''It would be a significant response to all those episodes of revisionism, alas all too present in Italy and in Europe, that seek to distort history and memory," Senator Monica Cirinna from the center-left Democratic Party.
Holocaust denial is already either implicitly or explicitly a crime in 17 European countries, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Switzerland and Romania.
The 70th anniversary of the Nazi raid on Rome’s Jewish ghetto which saw more than 1,000 Roman Jews deported to Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps, with only seven of them surviving, was commemorated during a ceremony at Rome’s main synagogue.
Last Friday, Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke, who took part in a 1944 massacre at the Ardeatine Caves in Rome that killed 335 men and boys, including about 75 Jews. died in Rome.
He was living under house arrest in Rome when he died. Extradited from Argentina in 1995, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1998 but was allowed to live under house arrest because of his age and ill health. He remained unrepentant to the end, saying he was only obeying orders.