An Auschwitz survivor warned Friday that `history is repeating itself` in Italy, where Roma, or gypsies, face state-sanctioned discrimination 70 years after the notorious racial laws here targetting Jews.

`Everything started with the census of Jews and the terrible consequences to which this led us,` recalled Piero Terracina at a conference marking the anniversary of the framing of the racial laws.

`Now history is repeating itself with the screening, listing and consequent fingerprinting of Roma,` the 80-year-old said of measures targetting gypsies introduced by the centre-right government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi which came to power in May.

The Italian cabinet approved the racial laws on November 15, 1938, which parliament unanimously adopted a month later, `in a climate of general indifference,` Terracina said.

The laws prohibited mixing between Jews and `Aryans,` expelled Jewish students and teachers from the school system and imposed economic constraints, among other measures.

`Still today there are minorities at risk ... even those who have been living amongst us for centuries and who have full citizenship,` Terracina told a conference on the theme, `Racism in Italy: Past and Present` at the American University of Rome.

`It can still happen that we move from ignorance to prejudice, to intolerance and then to hatred,` said Terracina, who was freed from the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz, occupied Poland, in January 1945.

Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, a member of the anti-immigration Northern League, announced the measures against Roma in June, saying they would `prevent phenomena such as begging,` adding that parents risked losing custody of their children.

The announcement sparked outrage among humanitarian groups and the left-wing opposition, as well as the European Parliament.

City authorities in Rome renounced fingerprinting but said they would go ahead with a census, in conjunction with the Red Cross of gypsies in and around the Italian capital.

Several gypsy camps in southern Italy were torched in May, forcing Roma inhabitants to flee under police protection.