The Italian Parliament is facing calls to decriminalise the country's libel laws after a journalist and a former newspaper director were given jail sentences.

Freedom of expression campaign group Article 19 issued its call over the case of journalist Orfeo Donatini and Tiziano Marson, former director of the newspaper Alto Adige, which is based in Bolzano, in Italy's South Tyrol.

The criminal case against the pair was started by Sven Knoll, a member of Bolzano's Provincial Council, who claimed that they libelled him in an article by Donatini which appeared in Alto Adige in 2008 and reported that he had taken part in a neo-Nazi summit in Val Passiria.