Sources at Italy's highest court on
Thursday said a new decree that overhauls Italy's drugs laws
paves the way for releasing "thousands of convicted smalltime
drug dealers from prison".
The move follows parliamentary approval of a decree earlier
this month that overhauls Italy's drugs laws and reclassifies
marijuana as a soft rather than a hard narcotic.
The new law also effectively removes jail time as a
sentence for smalltime dealers, offering community service and
other options in its place.
Sources at Cassation Court Thursday said inmates seeking
early release based on the law must first file a request which
will then be reviewed in court.
The new drug policy follows a Cassation decision in
February that threw out as "illegitimate" a 2005 law that
equated the possession of soft drugs to hard drugs, and was
blamed as a contributing factor to severe overcrowding in
Italian prisons.
Detractors of that law, which was sponsored at the time by
then-right-wing MP Gianfranco Fini and centrist MP Carlo
Giovanardi, argued it violated a 1993 popular referendum in
which a majority of Italians voted to decriminalize drug
possession for personal consumption.
The so-called Fini-Giovanardi law, which had been passed by
ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right government, had been
challenged several times, namely for violating the European
Union legal principle that the punishment must be proportional
to the crime.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © Copyright ANSA