Italian prosecutor’s claims against Guardian reporter flagged by human rights watchdog

Calogero Ferrara's libel suits against Lorenzo Tondo marked as potential intimidation on Council of Europe safety platform'

Two libel claims by an aggrieved Italian prosecutor against a Guardian journalist have been flagged as potential acts of state harassment and intimidation" on an alert system run by Europe's leading government-backed human rights organisation, the Council of Europe.

Calogero Ferrara, a prosecutor in Palermo, filed the defamation suits in 2019 against the journalist Lorenzo Tondo over a Facebook post and a series of allegedly inaccurate articles published by the Guardian. A first hearing of one of the libel cases has now been set for February 2022.