documento convocatoria

Nine years after the two sessions of the 38th Congress of the Nonviolent Radical Party, transnational and transparty in Geneva and Tirana, the situation of human rights in many countries in the world has become more difficult and dramatic. Despite the great hopes of creating a new International law, several openly authoritarian regimes, which stifle the freedom and lives of their citizens, have strengthened themselves. Bloody repressions have taken place – and are taking place even right now – in several countries of the wide Southern Mediterranean belt and in its hinterland, from Northern Africa to the Middle East, as well as in Central Asia. This is evidence that the political and economic crisis is spreading. Also, in sub-Saharian and Central Africa, hunger, thirst and conflicts are still killing millions of people. At the same time, there is a real danger that democracies, including some of the once historically more solid ones will  become «real democracies», as it was said in the past of those political systems that, betraying the socialist principle, became to be known as places of «real socialism».

Notwithstanding, great hopes for democratic and peaceful change have come from Northern Africa over the past few months: «the Arab Spring» instructs us to get closer to this reality, to express our full solidarity, organizing common strategies. This is why we have decided to hold an important time for discussion and decision-making of our party in Tunis, in agreement with the provisional Government and a number of expressions of Tunisian civil society.

The Radical Party is a non-violent organisation with first category consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. In this forum, it is possible to take the floor on behalf of the party, the representatives of oppressed people, dissidents and opponents of authoritarian and repressive regimes. The Radical Party is not an electoral subject and is open to people of any nationality or political party. In particular, Italian and European MPs, as well as key people from Governments and Parliaments of Europe and from all over the world are invited to the General Council in Tunis

After making a decisive contribution to the setting up of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Court and the UN moratorium on death penalty, time has come we took new measures to turn rights that exist only on paper into effective tools guaranteeing individual freedoms. During the General Council in Barcelona in September 2010, the party set the priority goal of activating jurisdictions at all levels for the affirmation of fundamental human rights. Thanks to the study prepared by Professor Cesare Romano, we have a detailed picture of what rules - for each State, derived from Conventions or International Treaties - can be used. We need to start from here to make existing rules and institutions alive, strengthen and reform them.  

The degeneration of «real democracy» should be treated as a potentially fatal disease of the democratic ideal. During the 2001 Congress in Tirana, we launched the proposal of the world of ‘democracy’ and of ‘democracies’. The supranational protection of democratic rights – universal rights acquired as natural – is a fundamental goal of the party, an objective that we have to pursue through non-violence, which the European Parliament (in a resolution on human rights in the world adopted in 2008) defined as «the most appropriate instrument to promote the affirmation of fundamental human rights». That resolution has been left until now without any consequence, concrete act nor budgetary commitment by European institutions and European political parties.

Thewar in Iraq has not only been a terrible tragedy, but also a failure, and an ongoing one, for the so called “democratic West” to propose democracy as a necessary tool for the world peaceful coexistence. We believe that it is for this very reason, that only the formal ascertainment of the responsibilities of those who led to the war can redeem, before the world public opinion, the appeal of the democratic method based on the Rule of Law. It has now been demonstrated that the ‘evidence’ relied on to launch the military attack was forged, but nothing has been tried to ascertain the truth about how the war was decided, and its launch sped up, in order to prevent the alternative to a peace that was concretely possible through the exile of Saddam. Over the past few weeks we have started the “Free Iraq” campaign. The documentation that over the years we have compiled has been recently enriched with new elements that should require further investigation.

The failure represented by ‘real democracies’, as we have seen, is first of all the failure of the illusion of the absolute sovereignty of nation-states. There is an involution of the process of the so-called European integration, where the ‘European homeland’ - that seemed born in and from the tragedy of the Holocaust – has been in time demolished by the nationalist and bureaucratic work of the Europe of fatherlands. The most serious consequences of this development have an impact on the Mediterranean civilization, along what has now became the Southern border of Europe. After 21 years from the collapse of the Berlin Wall, new walls, real or figurative, are raised: the one that the Mediterranean itself has became, acting as a cemetery for the massacre of migrants; the one planned between Greece and Turkey, the one built by Israel, the ghettos of ‘our’ cities, are all symbols of the failure of the European, cosmopolitan, tolerant, Euro-Mediterranean and secular hope. The Ventotene Manifesto remains a highly ambitious yet necessary political project for Europe, for freedom for the Tibetans, the Uighurs and therefore also for the Chinese, for all the peoples that are unrepresented and oppressed either by authoritarian regimes or by inadequate and powerless nation-states.