Italy has appealed a landmark European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruling against crucifixes in Italian classrooms that sparked a storm Tuesday in this heavily Catholic country. The appeal was announced by Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini who stressed that crosses were ''a symbol of Italian tradition'' and did not signify affiliation to the Catholic Church.
A successful appeal to the ECtHR would lead to Tuesday's ruling being reconsidered, state judge Nicola Lettieri said, but the verdict will become effective in three months if the appeal is turned down.
The ruling panel of the 47-member Council of Europe, which the court represents, will then have six months to decide what action the Italian government should take to avoid future suits, Lettieri said.
The ruling on a suit filed by a Finnish-born mother of two sparked outrage among Italian conservatives but was praised by progressives.
Italian bishops slammed it as ''biased'' but the Vatican said it would have to wait to examine the judges' explanation.
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini called the ruling ''a death blow for a Europe of values and rights,'' He said Europe's roots lay in its ''Christian identity''.
He added that the ruling was ''a very bad precedent for other religions''.
''At a time when we're trying to bring religions closer, the Christian religion gets whacked''.
''The Italian government will appeal; we criticise the ruling for the implications it may have''.
Italy's new opposition leader Pierluigi Bersani said the case showed that sometimes the law didn't have enough common sense.
''I think that on delicate issues like this, sometimes common sense falls victim to the law,'' said Bersani, who was recently elected head of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), Italy's largest opposition party.
''I think a longstanding tradition like the crucifix can't be offensive to anyone,'' said Bersani, a former Communist. Earlier, several members of the PD praised the ruling while others were less keen, spurring a call for the party to avoid a public spat on the issue.
Hard-left parties like the Italian Communists defended the court for upholding secular values and the separation of Church and State.
Catholic MPs called the ruling ''disgraceful'' with many repeating that Europe was betraying its identity.
In other reactions, the small hard-right Forza Nuova party vowed to ''form a human wall, if necessary'' to protect Italy's heritage from European jurists.
In its ruling, the ECtHR found that crucifixes in Italian classrooms were a violation of parents' rights to educate their children according to their principles.
Upholding a suit from Finnish immigrant Soile Lautsi, the Strasbourg-based court also said the crosses ran counter to a child's own rights to freedom of choice.
The Italian government was ordered to pay Lautsi, an Italian citizen, 5,000 euros in ''moral damages''.
The school near Padua attended by Lautsi's two daughters said it would to read the sentence before deciding whether to take its crosses down.
CROSS STATUS CONTROVERSY
Crucifixes are a fixture in Italian public buildings although the postwar Constitution ordered a separation of Church and State and Catholicism ceased to be Italy's state religion in 1984.
Using a legal loophole, two Fascist-era laws have sometimes been used to justify their status.
Tuesday's uproar was the latest in a string of flaps over crosses that began at the start of the decade.
A Muslim parent, Adel Smith, and a Jewish Italian judge, Luigi Tosti, have tried to have them removed while at least one teacher has been disciplined for protesting about them. Smith, the head of the small Union of Italian Muslims, succeeded in getting a court order in 2003 to have crosses removed from the school his children attended.
But the order was later reversed after a nationwide protest. Tosti has received suspended jail terms and bans from public office for refusing to enter courtrooms unless crucifixes are removed.
On Tuesday Tosti praised the ECtHR, saying it had had the courage which Italian courts had not shown on the issue.
Legal experts say crucifixes are not mandatory but customary in Italy's public buildings.
With Catholicism being such a part of Italy's cultural identity, local bodies decide whether they want crosses in schools and courthouses, and the majority of them do.
In 2004 Italy's Constitutional Court ruled that crosses should stay in courts and classrooms but did not give a juridical explanation for its ruling.
Many felt it had washed its hands of a political hot potato.
If it had upheld the separation of Church and State, the high court would have sparked outraged reactions from conservatives who were already incensed when some schools dropped Christmas plays and creches to avoid hurting the feelings of Muslim children.
The ECtHR upholds the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights to which the Council of Europe, Europe's only human rights body, adheres.
It is sometimes confused with the European Court of Justice, in Luxembourg, the EU's highest court.
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