Italy should reopen its brothels,
closed by a 1958 law, League leader Matteo Salvini said Monday.
Repeating an election campaign vow ahead of the March 4
general election, Salvini said "regulating and taxing
prostitution like in civilised countries, reopening brothels -
I'm ever more convinced about it".
Anti-immigrant, anti-euro leader Salvini has often advocated
reopening brothels and regulating sex work as a handful of other
European countries do.
Salvini's League is part of a centre-right alliance going
into the March 4 election, along with the centre-right Forza
Italia (FI) party of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi and the
Brothers of Italy (FdI) party of Giorgia Meloni.
The League, in its previous incarnation as the
once-secessionist Northern League, has filed legislation to
reintroduce brothels on several occasions but the laws have
never passed.
As recently as April 2014 the northern Lombardy region, long
run by the League, approved a referendum on a partial repeal of
the so-called Merlin law, which outlawed brothels in 1958.
The idea behind the repeal - which never made it to the
referendum stage - was to take prostitutes off the streets and
bring them to work in a safer environment behind closed doors.
Those in favour of the referendum, which was proposed by the
League, included Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right Forza Italia
party and the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement (M5S), with the
New Center Right and the centre-left Democratic Party opposing.
Centre-right lawmakers said the issue was a "battle to
overcome an obsolete and hypocritical law".
Sponsored by Socialist Senator Lina Merlin, the 1958 law
was passed over strenuous opposition from right-wing and
monarchist parties.
It abolished State regulation of prostitution and made
exploiting prostitutes a crime.
Merlin modeled her law on the example of French activist
and ex-prostitute Marthe Richard, who got similar legislation
passed in her country in 1946. She also sought to incorporate
the principles of a 1949 UN convention against human trafficking
and the exploitation of sex workers.
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