The Italian government violated residents' human rights by allowing festering heaps of garbage to go uncollected from the streets for months, a European high court said today.
Eighteen Italians who live or work in the town of Somma Vesuviana, near Naples, had filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights alleging the Italian government endangered their health and ruined the environment by failing to collect waste.
In its preliminary ruling Tuesday, the Strasbourg-based court said Italian authorities had for a "lengthy period been unable to ensure the proper functioning of the waste collection, treatment and disposal service".
This resulted in a violation of the residents' right to respect for their private lives and their homes, the court said.
Somma Vesuviana and the surrounding Campania region were under a state of emergency from 1994 to 2009 due to garbage collection problems that saw thousands of tonnes of waste pile up.
The state of emergency was lifted after new landfills were constructed and new German incinerators helped dispose of some of the waste.
But at the worst of the crisis, in 2008, plaintiffs...
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