On Monday, May 29th, the document instructing the campaign led by the Nonviolent Radical Party transnational transparty (NRPTT) together with a coalition of organizations for the recognition by the United Nations of the universal right to know was presented at the Syracuse International Institute for Criminal Justice and Human Rights.
The initiative stems from Marco Pannella’s attempt to prevent military action in Iraq in 2003. The right of all citizens to know must become a universal human right. One of Marco Pannella’s latest civil struggles, for which he frequently gave the example of the misleading and incomplete debate and information surrounding the circumstances in which the decision to go to war was made, found a concrete legal impetus in a document prepared by the members of the Scientific Council of Global Committee for the Rule of Law Committee chaired by professor emeritus Cherif Bassiouni.
“We are set on a path going radically in the opposite direction to that of 1948 when the UN Charter was signed and the promotion of human rights was the objective” Professor Bassiouni, founder of the Siracusa Institute, said. This document, already presented on May 25th at the NRPTT headquarters in Rome, “is definitely a step forward – he added – but the battle for the establishment of the right to know will be long. Each step will be fought by the States, but we have no choice. We cannot remain indifferent: indifference led to one of the most horrible crimes against humanity, the Holocaust of millions of Jews and Slavs from 1939. And what about 500,000 dead Syrians? Decision-making is no longer exercised by the States as well as by large international and multinational corporations.”
Ezechia Paolo Reale, lawyer and Secretary general of the Siracusa Institute, emphasized that an important path to establish a fundamental principle for next generation human rights has begun. “It is a right, the right to know, that will influence our future” Reale concluded.
At the press conference, in addition to Professor Bassiouni and Paolo Reale, were also present Laura Harth, representative of the NRPTT at the UN and Matteo Angioli, Secretary of the Global Committee for the Rule of Law “Marco Pannella” and member of the Presidency of the NRPTT.