Reopen brothels says Salvini (4)

(ANSA) - Rome, January 15 - 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.