Rome - Some 23,000, or around two-thirds of Roma children living in Italy, fail to attend any form of schooling, Italy's Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini, said Tuesday. Gelmini remarks followed a stinging attack by a major Italian Catholic weekly, in which it branded as "racist" the government's plan to fingerprint ethnic Roma, including children, as part new anti-crime measures.
"Out of at least 35,000 Roma children who should be attending school, those enrolled number 12,000," Gelmini said, defending the conservative government's proposals before a parliamentary education commission.
"A state cannot call itself Catholic, nor attentive, if it pretends not to see that Roma childrenare not in school and are being used as beggars instead," Gelmini said.
Famiglia Cristiana, which boasts a circulation of 3 million, has singled out practicing Roman Catholics in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's cabinet, like Gelmini, for failing to oppose the fingerprinting plan.
"For them human dignity amounts to zero," the magazine said in its latest issue.
Interior Minister Roberto Maroni who first propounded the fingerprinting proposal, has described it as part of a census to identify and protect Roma children living "with rats" in shanty towns around Italy.
"We would have given the minister (Maroni) credit if, together with the census, he had mentioned how he intends to offer Roma children schooling and remove them from those surroundings they currently share with rats," Famiglia Cristiana said.
Maroni, who is from the anti-immigration Northern League, wants to include the fingerprinting in a security package designed to crack down on illegal immigrants and child beggars, many of whom are ethnic Roma (colloquially known as gypsies).
The plan has drawn widespread criticism including from United Nations officials, human rights groups and Italian opposition parties.
Last week a spokesman for the European Commission, the EU executive, said member states singling out an ethnic group for fingerprinting would be breaking EU rules.
Surveys suggest many Italians associate the Roma with increasing levels of crime.
Late last year, the previous centre-left government expelled over 200 Romanian nationals with criminal records in the wake of the murder, allegedly by a Roma man of Romanian origin, of a housewife in Rome.
