It is with deep sorrow that we announce that on January 2nd Ezechia Paolo Reale passed away. A lawyer and an expert in international law, Mr. Reale was President of the Scientific Council of the Global Committee for the Rule of Law “Marco Pannella” and Secretary General of the Siracusa International Institute for Criminal Justice and Human Rights. While we express our condolences to the family and friends, we think back to the work side by side and the luck that this meant, not only from a professional point of view.
A student and a friend of Prof. Cherif Bassiouni, Paolo was in fact not only one of the leading experts in international criminal law, a passionate protagonist of international justice and the rule of law. He was a professional of great humanity passionate about the rule of law. When we the campaign for the right to know kicked off with Marco Pannella, Paolo became fight from the onset a source of trust and reliability, who was key to secure the adoption of two resolution at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the Human Rights Commission of the Italian Senate.
We would like to recall a principle the cornerstones of the right to know. This is what he called the thin red line between propaganda and international crime. On May 3, 2022, in an article written on the occasion of International Press Day, he wrote: “The promotion and execution of large and repeated hate and disinformation campaigns, directed against a specific national, religious, ethnic, political or sexual group it is not only morally or deontologically reprehensible but… a facilitation of the commission of international crimes.”
On 6 June 2022 the assembly of the Global Committee, convened thanks to the generosity of Paolo, spoke said that “propaganda in favor of an international crime is not freedom of expression of a thought, It’s a crime.”
Previously, he had turned his attention to the International Criminal Court, to whose creation he had contributed by dealing with the world’s leading jurists on the 1998 Rome Statute and participating in the 2010 Review Conference in Kampala.
A man of enormous sensitivity and participation in public life, starting from his community, his polis, having also been politically committed at a local level to make a contribution to progress. With this vision he had taken the initiative, together with other colleagues from the Luigi Einaudi Foundation, to remove the secrecy of the documents of the Scientific Technical Committee during the Covid-19 pandemic, believing that maintaining barriers between authorities and the population was a mistake. Depriving citizens of information on the reasons for some government choices limited knowledge and therefore understanding, doing Italy a disservice. Not only the defense of principles, therefore, but also their application with the aim of involving people.
These are just some of the countless initiatives undertaken by him, which were remembered in the Senate chamber on 10 January with the interventions of Senators Terzi, Nicita and Pucciarelli at the end of a debate on the conflict in Ukraine, on which we shared objectives and hopes and on which we tried to continue the path towards the activation of the crime of aggression on which so much had been spent.