Justice Minister Angelino Alfano said on Wednesday that he will sign an order to place a notorious Cosa Nostra boss, involved in the 1992 murder of an anti-mafia judge, back under a high-security prison regime known as 41-bis.
The regime had been lifted for Domenico (Mimmo) Ganci by a Palermo parole board at the end of last year, although it was only made public this week, and sparked protests from prosecutors and relatives of mafia victims.
''My office has informed me that there are sufficient elements to send Ganci back under 41-bis,'' Alfano said during a visit to Milan.
Ganci, who was arrested in June 1993, is believed to have been responsible for over 40 murders and was convicted for taking part in the plot to assassinate anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, who was blown up along with his wife and three members of his police escort while on the highway which links Palermo to its airport.
The 41-bis regime is currently applied to around 650 inmates being kept isolated in single-person cells in maximum-security jails.
Under the system, all conversations between prisoners and their families can be monitored and video-recorded, while monthly phone calls are only permitted for non-personal calls.
Inmates are allowed to meet their lawyers no more than three times a week and have only allowed a few hours a day to be in the open air, alone.
The tough regime was introduced in 1992 as a temporary measure designed to help cope with a Mafia emergency following Falcone's murder and that of his colleague Paolo Borsellino.
In 2002, the measure became a permanent fixture in the penal code.
The Italian the law has come under fire from some human rights bodies for its restrictive nature and some countries have refused to extradite accused persons to Italy because of it
The London-based human-rights group Amnesty International has expressed concern that the 41-bis regime could in some circumstances amount to ''cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment'' for prisoners.
A year ago the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the 41-bis violated two articles of the European Convention on Human Rights.
