Italian prisons should create “love rooms” so inmates can have sex with their wives or partners, say rights activists.

The prisoners’ rights group Hands Off Cain has called for “stanze dell’amore”, or love rooms, to be established after the Constitutional Court ruled that an inmate serving time in a prison in the northern city of Asti had been denied the right to have sex with his wife.

“Freedom to enjoy emotional relations constitutes a constitutionally protected right,” the court said in a recent ruling on the case.

The 34 year-old prisoner, identified only as A.S., took his complaint to Italy’s highest court after his previous request for conjugal access was rejected by a regional court in Turin. The details of his crime and sentence have not been revealed.