Marco Pannella (May 2, 1930) is the leader of the Nonviolent Radical Party Transnational and Transparty.

He was educated at the University of Urbino where he studied Law and graduated at 22. He then became a journalist.

In 1955, following a split within the Italian Liberal party, he co-founded the Radical Party.

From 1960 to 1963, he worked in Paris as a correspondent for the Italian newspaper “Il Giorno”.

Back in Italy, he animated the anti-militarist marches that took place mainly in the northern part of the country. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Mr Pannella established several single-issue organizations to promote key struggles for the advancement of civil rights in the country, including the Italian League for Divorce (1965), the League for Objection of Conscience (1971), the League for the Abrogation of the Concordat (1971).

He has been at the forefront in promoting important reforms regarding narcotics, thus facing incarceration on various occasions for his civil disobediences. He played a prominent role in the pro-choice movement in Italy that led to the legalization of abortion in the early 1980s. He also promoted actions to grant electoral rights for Italians aged 18.

Engaged in the defence of civil rights in Eastern European countries, in 1968, he was arrested in Sofia for having distributed leaflets against the Communist regime along with fellow Party members.

He was first elected in the Chamber of Deputies in 1976 and was always re-elected until 1994 and to the European Parliament from 1979 to 2009.

In November 1981, he was elected Secretary of the Radical Party and remained in office until November 1983.

At the Party Congress in Budapest in 1989, Mr Pannella launched the transformation of the Transnational Radical Party into an NGO with Consultative Status at the UN ECOSCOC.

A believer in Gandhian nonviolence, Mr. Pannella has carried out several hunger strikes in Italy and elsewhere to champion civil rights, and to back other struggles such as the end of extermination through starvation the world over (1980) and the implementation of a UN Moratorium on death penalty (2007).