Bonafede under fire for Battisti video

(ANSA) - Rome, January 16 - Rome's chamber of criminal lawyers is set to file a petition against Justice Minister Alfonso Bonafede over a video he posted on Facebook about the return to Italy of ex-terrorist Cesare Battisti, sources said on Wednesday. The video include moments in which Battisti's identification photograph and fingerprints were taken. Earlier on Wednesday the ombudsman for Italian prison inmates, Mauro Palma, said he wanted Bonafede to take down the video in which, dressed in a warder's uniform, he exults over the Battisti's capture.
    "Unfortunately, (the video) joins the reference to "rotting" (in jail) that Interior Minister (Matteo Salvini) has expressed on several occasions in his own videos," Palma said. Palma said "phrases and images that aim to gain consensus via a language extraneous to the Constitution end up consolidating a culture of social unravelling". Bonafede and Salvini have been criticised for allegedly hogging the limelight over Battisti's capture in Bolivia after 37 years on the run from a life sentence for four murders.
    Bonafede donned a warder's uniform and Salvini his customary police uniform in a hyped-up photo op to greet Battisti's return to Italy. Critics said Salvini's wish that Battisti should rot in jail clashes with the Constitutionally mandated principle of rehabilitation for prisoners. Supreme Council of Magistrates (CSM) Vice President David Ermini said Wednesday he personally wouldn't have shot the video that Bonafede did celebrating Battisti's capture. Bonafede has been accused of self-glorification in shooting the video where he appears in a prison guard's uniform and boasts about his ministry's success. "I wouldn't have done it", said Ermini, adding "I'm speaking on a personal level". The CSM is the Italian judiciary's self-governing body, whose titular head is Italian President Sergio Mattarella.