Adulterers beware of the love bug as spying spouses get their way
Friday August 03 2007
PEOPLE having an affair in Italy would be well advised in future not to use their car for illicit assignations.
An Italian judge yesterday ruled that wives or husbands who suspect marital infidelity are entitled under the law to bug their spouse's car in the search for incriminating evidence.
The ruling arose in Brescia, northern Italy, where a private detective agency specialising in infidelity cases, offered to plant hidden microphones and satellite tracking devices "in a couple of hours" in the cars of suspected spouses, at a cost of up to €1,500.
After some of the devices were found, police charged 22 people - including private detectives and mechanics as well as the jealous spouses - with "invasion of privacy".
Yesterday, however, Lorenzo Benini, a judge in Brescia, ruled that to plant bugging devices in a car was "not a criminal offence".
Private
"However disconcerting this may be, I find no penalty under the law for intercepting private conversations or communications in a vehicle. It is not illegal."
The judge said that the law forbidding bugging applied only to homes, with a penalty of up to four years in prison.
Judge Benini acknowledged that the loophole was "a cause for alarm", but he insisted that "the law is the law". In acquitting the 22 accused, he suggested that parliament might "take another look" at Italy's privacy laws.
In a country where corruption is rife, there are fears that the loophole could also be exploited by those engaged in other forms of espionage, industrial or political.
In a separate case yesterday, the Court of Cassation, Italy's highest court of appeal, ordered an "obsessively jealous" husband not only to leave the marital home but to move to another town altogether to stop him trying to control his wife's every move.
The court said that the husband, named only as Roberto under privacy laws, had in effect imprisoned his wife Maria by forbidding her to leave their home at Lecce, in Puglia, southern Italy, and installing a video surveillance camera outside the house.
It said that he had also obliged her to have his mother to stay in the house whenever he was away.
The appeal judges rejected his plea that his actions arose from his "loving attentions" toward his wife.
Meanwhile, a survey in Donna Moderna, a women's magazine, said that 92pc of Italian women would not forgive their husband for betraying them.
The survey was taken after the resignation this week of Cosimo Mele, a Catholic MP from the Christian Democratic UDC, after it emerged that he had spent a night at a luxury Rome hotel suite with two prostitutes. (© The Times, London)
- Richard Owen
