1. To protect the children from "exploitation, crime and disappearing."
   
2. It will facilitate inserting children into scholarization programs.
   
3. It's based on a 1939 law still in effect that allows photographic identification of people without documents. (Almost all Rom have documents though.)
   
4. It is only a census.

Most see it simply as ethnic criminalization.

However, it may be noted a similar program was carried out by the "center-left" mayor Rutelli in the late nineties, a so-called census, without much protest outside advocacy groups.

The vote by the EU parliament is on all the front pages and is causing quite a debate. The vote is considered one of the harshest positions adopted towards a fellow state. So much the better.

Maroni's reaction was that in no time the rest of Europe would adopt the same measures.