New trend in Italy: arranged weddings between Romanian women and non-EU citizens

Vineri, 9 mai 2008, 13:45 English | Regional Europe

Italian media reports the emergence of a new wave of arranged weddings in the country - this time between Romanian women and men from North Africa, in an attempt to dodge the national legislation on immigration. As Romanian women are EU citizens, they thus offer non-EU men the possibility to stay in Italy legally, La Repubblica newspaper reports, quoted by Romanian monitoring agency Rador.

The peak came when four such weddings were celebrated at the Milan city hall in one day - after similar events in the day before and the one before that. All involved Romanian women as future wives of non-EU grooms, and everything was perfectly legal.

But according to the source suspicion arose that the real purpose of such unions was that of non-EU citizens to obtain the status of European citizens following Romania's accession in the EU in 2007.

All grooms and wives knew each other before the ceremonies, but some men showed up accompanied by translators because they could not communicate with their future wives in the same language, according to sources quoted by the newspaper.