'NO BAR ON CROSSES'

'NO BAR ON CROSSES'

(ANSA) - Rome, November 6 - A landmark European Court ruling against crosses in classrooms doesn't oblige Italy to take them down, Premier Silvio Berlusconi said Friday.

"It is not a coercive sentence and there's nothing stopping us keeping the crucifixes in the classrooms," the premier said.

Therefore, he said, a proposed referendum to keep the crosses was not needed.

Nonetheless, after almost a week of popular outrage, Italy is appealing the sentence by the European Court of Human Rights.

The appeal was framed by the cabinet Friday and Foreign Minister Franco Frattini was appointed to shepherd it through.

The ruling could be repealed or altered by the appeal.

Otherwise, it will go into effect in three months' time.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) made its much-publicised ruling Tuesday, upholding an appeal from a Finnish-born Italian citizen who had vainly made her case in Italian courts.

The ECHR ruled parents must be allowed to educate their children as they saw fit and children must also have freedom of religion.

It also said crosses might offend or frighten children brought up in other religions.

The woman, Soile Lautsi, was awarded 5,000 euros in damages.

Italian Catholic politicians reacted with outrage, saying the court was betraying Europe's Christian roots.

They argued that the cross was a traditional cultural symbol and not a mark of religious affiliation.

The leader of Italy's largest opposition party, ex-Communist Pierluigi Bersani, said the court should have shown more ''common sense''.

The Vatican called the ruling "short-sighted" while Italian bishops said it was "ideological".

The European Commission did not comment on the ruling because it is from a non-European Union court.

The Strasbourg-based ECHR upholds the 1950 Convention on Human Rights for the 47-member Council of Europe, the continental-wide human rights body.

The EU's top court, sometimes confused with the ECHR, is the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice (ECJ).

The EU's new Lisbon Treaty, set to come into force in January, does not cite Christianity as part of the Union's common heritage.

This was despite loud calls from conservatives, renewed after the cross decision.