Are there historical precedents?
The only historical precedent was article 603 of the Italian Penal Code. This provision, enacted under Mussolini, addressed what was called the crime of plagio. It consisted in the offence of “subjecting another person to one’s own power in a manner which reduces him to a total state of subjection”. It carried a maximum penalty of fifteen years imprisonment. On 28 November 1969, a lecturer in philosophy, Signor Also Brabanti, challenged in the Rome Appeal Court a sentence of nine years’ imprisonment for ‘totally enslaving’ two young students (The Times, 29 November 1969). His conviction was upheld but the court reduced his sentence to five years; though at the time this was being written a further appeal was pending. The law was declared unconstitutional in 1981 and stricken from the Criminal code by the Constitutional Court as being “imprecise, lacking coherence and liable to arbitrary application”. In the 1980s, anti-cultists also came very close to pass deprogramming laws, which wou
