Urban stadium ban for those who harass passengers at the ticket office, but not for unauthorised parking attendants
The station is off-limits to anyone loitering by the ticket machines offering ‘help’ with tickets. Unauthorised parking attendants are only removed if they cause a nuisance
Station off limits to anyone loitering by the ticket machines offering “help” with tickets. As for unauthorised parking attendants, however, the areas in which they operate may only be off-limits if they are a nuisance and their danger to society is therefore proven. The Court of Cassation, in two judgements, clarifies the limits of application of the measure aimed at safeguarding public decency.
Stadium bans are not for ‘idlers and vagrants’
It clarifies, in line with the Constitutional Court, that this cannot be applied to all ‘idlers and vagrants’, as had been claimed during the lengthy parliamentary debate that took place when the legislation was converted into law (Decree-Law 14/2017). It is therefore not sufficient, in order to exclude a person, that their presence ‘may appear inappropriate to the decorum of the area in question’.
It takes more than that: a threat that is evident in their behaviour, for example an aggressive, violent or persistently harassing attitude towards those frequenting the area or the premises. On this basis, the Supreme Court therefore dismissed one appeal and upheld another. The conviction for breaching the Daspo was upheld against a young defendant, born in 2001, who frequented the railway station – and in particular the area where the ticket machines are located – where he was pestering passengers by offering to help them buy tickets.
Social danger is required
In the judges’ view, this behaviour was such as to ‘impede the normal flow of passengers and the free use of transport infrastructure’. That was enough to secure his conviction.
The fate of the more seasoned unauthorised parking attendant was quite the opposite: precisely because of his activities, he had been barred from a square in Caserta. The judges deemed this a disproportionate restriction on his freedom, in the absence of an assessment by the Court of Appeal – whose verdict has been quashed and the case remitted - of the specific risk to public safety posed by the man’s presence in the restricted area, ‘as it is not possible to assess this solely on the basis of the individual’s character – as stated in the judgement – as inferred from his criminal record’.
