In another message all organizational and logistical information will be forwarded.

 

To convene our Congress with such a short notice has been a difficult choice, considered the structural weaknesses of our party. However, it was a necessary choice - a decision that we owe, first and foremost, to the many representatives of oppressed and non represented peoples, and to the many nonviolent activists and leaders, who in the last decades have trusted the Party and have demonstrated to be interested and to believe in the political project and reality it represents.

 

Indeed, we need to update and to propose, again and more strongly, the tools and goals of political nonviolence, of democratic hope, of the universal affirmation of human rights, of European and world federalism as alternatives to the degeneration of liberal democracies towards ‘real democracies’, to the persistent illusion of absolute national sovereignty, and to the eventual systematic cancellation of human rights that have been historically acquired and are now perceived as ‘natural’.

 

While we are organizing for Thursday, January 20 a demonstration in London to ask the truth on the war in Iraq, which is a key part of the initiative of convening the Congress, we kindly ask you to be ready from now, in your country, in your town, within your political movement or association and with your friends, to circulate this invitation in order to have the highest possible number of significant participants in the Chianciano Congress.

 

As for us, we will politically and financially do our utmost to ensure to every participant the best logistical conditions we will be able to obtain.

 

Thank you very much in advance for all you will be able to do!

 

I shall look forward to meeting in Chianciano on 17th February.

 

Fraternal greetings!

 

Yours,

 

Marco Pannella

 

 

 

CONVENING DOCUMENT OF THE CONGRESS OF RADICAL PARTY

by NRPTT Presidency: Maurizio Turco, Matteo Mecacci, Marco Perduca

 

Nine years after the Congress in Tirana: the new, actually very old, ‘International World Order’ against human rights.

 

We write to convene our party congress at nine years after the last one, which two sessions took place in Geneva and in Tirana in 2002. From that year, the human rights situation in many countries has became more difficult if not dramatic or tragic.

Notwithstanding 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.

 

Indigenous groups, “minorities” as well as unrepresented peoples continue their struggle for their very existence; among those closest to us, many of them over the years have made us the honor to become members of our party: our Montagnard brothers in Vietnam; their Khmer Khrom neighbours, in Southern Vietnam and Cambodia; the leadership of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam; the Laotian human rights defenders; the Tibetans, the Uighurs, the other ethnic and religious minorities including the peaceful practitioners of Falun Dafa spiritual discipline all persecuted by the Beijing regime.

 

All basic human rights of all those that live in China continue to be systematically violated: the idea that economic development in itself would bring democracy and rights to the Chinese proved to be an illusion. The Chinese system is also blocking any positive evolution or development in other countries, such as Burma or North Korea.

 

Bloody repressions are taking place – even in these very hours – in several countries of the wide Southern Mediterranean belt and in its hinterland, from Northern Africa to the Middle East, as well as in substantial parts of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The bread riots in Algeria and Tunisia are yet another example of the spread of a global political and economic crisis. At Europe’s borders, the Chechen people is virtually annihilated and certainly has disappeared from any news story, and – after the August 2008 war in Georgia – a new conflict is looming in the northern Caucasian Republics.

 

We are not facing, however, only a strengthening of authoritarian regimes or dictatorships. In fact, at the same time, many democracies str denying their founding principles. There is a real danger that democracies – including some of those once, historically, more solid – will become ‘real democracies’, as it was said in the past of those political systems that, betraying the socialist principles, became to be known as places of ‘real socialism’.

 

Meanwhile, in sub-Saharan and central Africa the extermination by hunger, thirst, and conflicts, which we managed to contrast in the early 1980s, is still killing millions of people. No less tragic is the ‘war on drugs’, powered by the crazy spiral of prohibitionism, which is ruining entire regions in Central and Sothern America and is consigning several societies to organized crime, which is, indeed, becoming a structural transnational force.

 

To all this, the only appropriate response would be a new federalist project; but, on the contrary, also within the European Union herself, what was prophetically warned by Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi and Eugenio Colorni in their 1941 “Manifesto of Ventotene for a Free and United Europe”, and later by us, is becoming true: the order based, once more, on nation-states is leading both Europe and the member states to a ruinous future. The EU – which could be a positive example of federalism also for other areas of the world – still has 27 armies, 27 diplomatic corps; and the general tendency is to encourage the creation of even more new states and armies, to give as ‘gift’ to the “oppressed peoples” further nationalism rather than new forms of integration.

 

The global system of protection of human rights and lives has failed. A patent example of this is Haiti, where, at one year after the earthquake, cholera is spreading because nobody managed to provide for the burial of the more than 220.000 dead.

 

This is the so called ‘international world order’ today.

 

We believe that it is exactly for the work that we have done in the past that we have lost a key tool to denounce before the United Nations all the systematic violations of rights and international law where the international community was supposed to take action on matters pertaining to Human Rights. In fact, the Geneva “UN Human Rights Council”, far from continuing what the Human Rights Commission was trying to do, has became the privy purse of dictators, theocrats, despots, authoritarian and totalitarian states. After the failed attempt to expel the Nonviolent Radical Party from the UN, where it enjoys a consultative status as a first-category NGO, the coalition of totalitarian regimes and ‘real-democracies’ reacted ‘occupying Geneva’, in order to make it a new trench of the enemies of peace and freedom.

 

The Congress in Chianciano: A Radical Agenda for a New Democratic Hope.

The 39th Congress of the Nonviolent Radical Party, Transnational and Transparty is convened in Chianciano from February 17 to 20, to urgently address objectives that can give new hope to democracy and the Rule of Law, as tools for citizens all over the world to Address the main political and social issues of our time. The topics on the agenda of the Congress represent, even in the current inadequacy of the human and financial resources of our party, not just ‘positions’ or mere wishful thinkings, but actual fronts of political initiative, in continuity with the facts and extraordinary national and international reforms fostered during the 60-year history of the Radical Party. The Congress in Chianciano is the opportunity to re-launch and to provide a quality leap for that history and those initiatives.

 

“The life of the Rule of Law for the right to life”

After giving a decisive contribution to the successful creation of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, for the establishment the International Criminal Court, and for the UN Universal Moratorium on the death penalty, it is time to take further steps to transform ‘on-paper’ rights into effective instruments for the protection of individual freedoms. At its General Council held in September 2010 in Barcelona, the Party set as a priority the activation of those jurisdiction charged with the protection and affirmation of fundamental human rights. Thanks to a study prepared by Professor Cesare Romano, we have been able to detail a picture of what rules – for each state, derived from the Conventions or international Treaties they have recognized – can be used by citizen to have their human rights violations be addressed and redressed. At the Congress in Chianciano we intend to start to concretely implement the rules and institutions that already exist, to strengthen and reform those that do not work for the full enjoyment of internationally recognized human rights.

 

The “World Organization of Democracy and Democracies”. Political Nonviolence

Another major topic for debate and action will be the degeneration of the ‘real democracies’, which as become a true life-threatening disease of the democratic ideal. At the 38th Congress in Tirana, in 2002, we launched the proposal of a World Organization of Democracy and of Democracies. The international protection of democratic rights –universal rights historically acquired and today considered as ‘natural’ – remains a fundamental objective of our party; a goal we want to pursue through nonviolence. That same nonviolent that the European Parliament, in its Report on human rights in the world prepared by Marco Cappato and approved in 2008, was defined as “the most appropriate instrument to promote the affirmation of basic human rights”. That resolution has been left till now without any political consequence, concrete act nor budgetary commitment by European institutions and the various political parties present at the European Parliament.

 

The Truth about the “Free Iraq” Campaign

The war 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 is is exactly for this very reason, that only the formal ascertainment of the political responsibilities and the legal sanction for 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’ on which the Coalition relied to launch the military attack was forged, but nothing has been tried to to ascertain the truth about how the war was decided, and its launch sped up, in order to prevent the alternative of a peace that was concretely possible through the exile of Saddam. The exile perspective is a scenario on which, in those very weeks, our Party with its “Free Iraq” campaign, was mobilizing legislators and the public world over. The documentation that over the years we have compiled has been recently enriched with new elements that should require further investigation and – we believe – the indictment of the top leaders who were the main responsible of the attack on Iraq.

 

A European Homeland and Europe of the Fatherlands, the Ventotene Manifesto of Federalism, the Euro-Mediterranean Area

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 Shoah - has been with 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. At 21 years of 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.

 

“The Italian Plague of non-democracy and non-knowledge”

In the past couple of years, we have documented in detail how the Evil of fascist totalitarianism has survived in its metamorphosis into a partitocratic regime through a 60-year work of systematic destruction of the Constitution and of the Rule of Law in Italy and the daily betrayal of the popular will on the most important and urgent needs of the Italian society. Thanks to the Radical Centre for Monitoring Italian Broadcasting Companies, today we are in a position to use new scientific methods to measure the denial, first of all, of the right to be informed in order to decide. This new technical tool can further help us to raise the alarm on the new ‘plague’ that has already started to infect a big part of the ‘democratic’ world.

 

“From the Body to the Body Politics”, Anti-prohibitionism, a “soft demographic return”

Political or religious fundamentalisms are hampering the choices of individual self-determination on issues concerning life, medical care, and scientific research all over the world. Illiberal ideologies embodied in the decades-long prohibitionist war on drugs – that has increasingly become a war against people, democracy, science, and the Rule of Law – and by the waiving, at the United Nations, of any policy concerning birth and population control and the management of their environmental consequences on a planet that will soon exceed seven billion people. The Nonviolent Radical Party intends to re-launch its alternative secularism, based on individual freedom and responsibility, legalization and regulation, liberal policies to promoted the ‘soft return’ of the population in more humane numbers.

 

“The Nonviolent Radical Party, Transnational and Transparty”

The Radical Party is a nonviolent organization with first-category consultative status at the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. This affiliation allowed representatives of oppressed and non represented peoples, dissidents, religious groups, and opponents of authoritarian regimes the invaluable opportunity to take the floor in UN fora in New York, Geneva, Vienna and elsewhere. The Radical Party does not compete as such in national or international elections and it is therefore open to the membership of individuals of any nationality and or political affiliation. In particular, we are inviting to take part in our Congress in Chianciano also members of national Parliaments and of the European Parliament, along with other politicians and government officials from African and Asian Legislative assemblies.

 

 

_____

 

Chianciano Terme is located in the beautiful Tuscany region between Florence and Rome. In order to fully participate in the Congress, you should plan to arrive in Rome by the morning of Thursday, February 17. A shuttle bus service will be organized between Rome Fiumicino airport and Chianciano. As for your return flight, you should plan it not before 21:00 of Sunday, February 20.