Italy Rejects LGBTQ+ Protection Law

ITALY24

Three years after its first presentation to the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Italy’s Senate voted against the ddl Zan, a law intended to protect LGBTQ+ minorities, on October 27, 2021.

The ddl (“disegno di legge” translated from Italian as “bill” or “draft/proposed law”) Zan, named after the Democratic Party’s deputy Alessandro Zan who presented it back in 2018, was an amendment to Italy’s hate crime law that would add  gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability protections. The law also introduced a national day against homophobia and transphobia (collectively known as homotransphobia in Italy), coinciding with the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia on May 17, and the allocation of €4 million (CAD $5.75 million) for non-profits that organize educational activities and events.

The ddl Zan was presented  around October 2019 and July 2020, then discussed in the Chamber of Deputies, modified and approved on November 4, 2020 with 295 votes in favour from the Democratic Party, Five Stars Movement, Italy Alive, Free and Equal and many independent MPs, but 193 votes against from the right wing coalition of the League, Brothers of Italy, and Italy Forward. It was later presented to the Senate’s justice commission (led by a senator from the League) and marked as a non-priority.

The most peculiar episode in the ddl’s development occurred on June 17, 2021. The Vatican intervened with a formal diplomatic complaint written by the Vatican’s Minister of Foregin Affairs, expressing the Catholic Church’s concerns towards the enactment of the ddl Zan. The Church cited the Lateran Treaty, an agreement between the Church and the Italian state, which was first signed in 1929 by Pope Pius XI and Italy’s PM Benito Mussolini. The treaty was then revised in 1985, where it is stated that the Church has the freedoms of thought, press, speech, assembly, and protest in Italy. The Church said the ddl Zan was a threat to these freedoms but represented, according to critics, the first case of direct intervention of another state in Italian internal policy.       

After this episode, more discussions moved to the Senate, where the vote was delayed two times. On October 27, the rightmost parties, League and Brothers of Italy, asked for a secret vote.

Secret votes are generally called when a party believes that an opposing party’s deputies may vote against their party if votes are cast anonymously.

The right wing was hoping to allow religious, socially conservative Catholic lawmakers  within  the Democratic Party and Italy Alive to vote against their party platforms. The Senate then rejected the law with 154 votes against and 131 in favour.

Proponents of the law argued about the need to recognize homophobia as a problem, to educate the present and more importantly the next generations, and to quantify the number of attacks and aggressions on LGBTQ+ people. The arguments against the approval of the law criticized its perceived uselessness, since violence in general is already criminalized and critics saw  no need to categorize it as homotransphobic. Critics  said protecting LGBTQ+ minorities imply that they are superior to others, and that the law is against the freedom of speech and is part of LGBTQ+ propaganda. Left-wing critics accused  the Democratic Party of promoting  a barely sufficient law in order to gain consensus.

Since homophobia-motivated crimes do not currently exist, there are no official statistics of the crimes. There are many lists of aggressions made by different associations that are partial and often not in agreement with each other, but they average about 120 incidents per year. 

Homophobia is significantly more prevalent in Italy than in Canada. A survey made by Istat (Italy’s  National Institute of Statistics) reports some data on this. The survey showed, 59.1 per cent  of the population agree with the possibility for a man to be in a homosexual relationship, 59.5 per cent for a woman, 43.9 per cent agree with the possibility for a homosexual couple to marry, but just 20 per cent agrees with their right to adoption, 41.4 per cent doesn’t agree with the possibility of an LQBTQ+ person being a elementary school teacher, 28.1 per cent to be a doctor and 24.8 per cent to be a politician, only 20 per cent of those in the LQBTQ+ community came out to their parents, 24 per cent felt discriminated at school and 22.1 per cent on the workplace.