European rights court says Italy’s anti-Mafia freemasonry raid went too far

(CN) — Italy’s hunt for hidden Mafia links inside freemasonry went a step too far Tuesday after Europe’s top human rights court ruled Parliament overreached by seizing thousands of members’ names.

The European Court of Human Rights’ Grand Chamber found Italy violated the privacy rights of Grande Oriente d’Italia, the country’s largest Masonic association, after a parliamentary anti-Mafia commission searched its Rome headquarters and seized paper and digital files containing the personal data of more than 6,000 members. The association argued the 2017 raid violated its rights to privacy, freedom of association and an effective remedy.

The judges accepted that Parliament had a legitimate reason to investigate whether Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, and the ’Ndrangheta, its powerful Calabrian counterpart, had built influence inside freemasonry. But they said that goal did not give lawmakers a free pass to sweep up private information.

“It would not be compatible with the convention to find that the exercise of such broad investigatory powers could be justified by the mere fact that they derive from a parliamentary commission of inquiry, without taking into account the potentially serious consequences for the rights of third parties,” the court wrote.

The judges pointed to the breadth of the search, the commission’s wide discretion and the lack of meaningful oversight. They warned allowing Parliament to use such powers without adequate checks “would risk affording parliamentary commissions virtually unlimited discretion in this area, which would be difficult to reconcile with the requirements of the rule of law.”

Few institutions carry more baggage in Italy than freemasonry. That reputation was cemented in 1981 by the P2 scandal, when investigators raiding the villa of Licio Gelli, a Tuscan businessman and lodge leader, found a membership list for a secret Masonic lodge known as Propaganda Due. The names read like a map of the Italian establishment: military officers, intelligence chiefs, politicians, bankers, businessmen and journalists.

The scandal toppled Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani’s government, pushed Parliament to ban secret associations and left Italians with a lasting fear that private networks could operate like a state behind the state.

That was the concern driving Parliament’s inquiry. In 2016, lawmakers began examining whether the Sicilian and Calabrian Mafias had infiltrated lodges in Sicily and Calabria after prosecutors described a hidden “grey area” linking organized crime with professionals and public officials. Grande Oriente repeatedly refused to hand over its membership lists, arguing the request targeted thousands of people without identifying any specific criminal investigation.

The parliamentary commission answered with a search warrant. On March 1, 2017, police searched the association’s headquarters and the grand master’s residence, seizing computers, hard drives, USB sticks and membership records dating back to 1990.

The commission later stressed its inquiry “did not concern freemasonry as an association but rather the Mafia and its infiltration into the Masonic associations in Sicily and Calabria.” Its final report said screening the membership lists identified 193 people who had faced Mafia-related criminal proceedings, including 122 Grande Oriente members.

Finding suspected Mafia ties did not, in the judges’ view, excuse how Parliament gathered the information. The search order gave lawmakers sweeping discretion, captured sensitive membership data on a massive scale and left Grande Oriente with no meaningful way to challenge the raid.

Grande Oriente’s counsel welcomed the ruling.

“A Parliamentary commission, or Parliament itself, when adopting restrictive measures against third parties cannot have MORE powers … than the judiciary,” said Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich, counsel for Grande Oriente d’Italia and a retired professor of comparative law at Roma Tre University. He said the principle now extends beyond Italy, requiring parliamentary investigations throughout the Council of Europe to operate under the same constitutional guardrails.

Pasquale Annicchino, associate professor of law at the University of Foggia, said the judgment is significant because it addresses one of Italy’s most politically sensitive issues.

“The infiltration of organized crime into freemasonry is a highly sensitive issue, particularly within certain Italian regions,” he said.

But he said lawmakers cannot sidestep procedural safeguards simply because they are investigating organized crime. Once parliamentary inquiries begin using coercive powers that directly affect people’s rights, those protections become essential.

Francesca Fanucci, head of law and policy at the European Center for Not-For-Profit Law Stichting, said the judgment recognizes large-scale searches and seizures can have far-reaching consequences for both the organization as such and its members.

But she said the court ultimately pulled back from tackling what she considers the broader civil-liberties issue. “The court misses the opportunity to examine whether there was also a violation of the plaintiff’s right to freedom of association under Article 11 of the convention,” she said, referring to the right to form and join organizations.

By treating the case largely as one about privacy, Fanucci explained, the judges left unanswered whether forcing an association to reveal its membership can damage its reputation, discourage people from joining or remaining members and create a chilling effect on the freedom to associate. She said she hopes future cases take a more integrated approach by recognizing that measures interfering with privacy can also interfere with freedom of association.

The Italian government did not respond to a request for comment.

The Grand Chamber awarded Grande Oriente 9,600 euros (about $11,000) in nonpecuniary damages and 5,344 euros (about $6,100) in costs and expenses. It found no need to separately examine the association’s freedom-of-association and effective-remedy complaints because the privacy violation resolved the central issue.

The judgment is final. Italy cannot appeal, must pay the award within three months and will have to ensure future parliamentary investigations respect the same procedural safeguards even when the target is the Mafia.

Courthouse News reporter Eunseo Hong is based in the Netherlands.