• To apply to the conference please fill the registration form and send it to basso@fondazionebasso.it

Globalization and fundamental rights, 40 years after the Universal Declaration of Peoples’ Rights

Agenda, 4th July
Chamber of Deputies
Via di Campo Marzio 78

9:00– 9:30 – Registration to the conference

9:30 – Opening greetings Laura Boldrini,* President of the Chamber of Deputies

9:45 -10.15 – Opening Remarks and Institutional Greetings

Elena Paciotti, President of the Lelio and Lisli Basso ISSOCO Foundation

Salvatore Senese, former President of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal
Fabio Porta, Chair of the Permanent Committee Italians in the world Chamber of Deputies

10:30 – 13:00 – First session
Forty years after the Algiers Declaration : an overview reading of peoples’ rights

From the Algiers Declaration to contemporary scenarios
Philippe Texier, Judge, Vice-President of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal

Peoples’ Rights in a globalized society
Luigi Ferrajoli, International jurist, Roma3 University

International Law and Economic Treaties
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable International order, United Nations, Human Rights Council

The Limits of International Law Institutions: the case of the International Criminal Court(ICC)
Flavia Lattanzi, Professor of International Law, former Judge ad litem for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and for the International Criminal Tribunal for Ex-Yugoslavia

Debate, interaction with the audience

Chaired by Pietro Veronese, journalist

*to be confirmed

14:30 – 17:30 – Second Session
Peoples as right holders

Impunity, transitional justice and the right from below
Javier Giraldo Moreno, Jesuit, member of the Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular of Colombia

Rebel memories and peoples’ right to speech
Carlos Beristain, MD, psychologist and social expert on violence and violations of human rights, University Pedro Arrupe, Bilbao

Migrants, the new people of globalization
Fulvio Vassallo Paleologo, Jurist, University of Palermo

Gendered rights: living wages as paradigm for the denial of self‐determination
Mary E. John, Centre for Women Development Studies, New Dehli

The struggle for dignity of minorities and Indigenous people
Mrinal Kanti Tripura, Director Maleya Foundation, Bangladesh

Debate with the audience

Chaired by Anna Maria Giordano, Radio 3 Mondo, RAI

Agenda, July 5th
LUMSA – Sala convegni Giubileo
Via di Porta Castello, 44

9:00 – 9:30 – Registration to the conference

9:30 – 11:30 – Third Session
Challenges to peoples’rights

The finanziarization of global economy: what space left for democracy?
Roberto Schiattarella, Economist, University of Camerino

Peoples’rights and environment
Antoni Pigrau Solé, Law Professor University of Rovira y Virgili, Tarragona

Crimes against the Peoples in International Law
Daniel Feierstein, Sociologist, University Tres de Febrero and University of Buenos Aires

Europe of rights : rethoric or future?
Luciana Castellina, Journalist and writer

Debate with the audience

11:30 – 12:00 Coffee break

12:00 – 13:30 – Fourth session
Strategies and promotion actions of Peoples’ rights

The sovereignty of Peoples: platforms and social networks as resistance and rights’ promotion
Brid Brennan, Transnational Institute, Amsterdam

Media and rights : highest rate of information, lowest rate of truth
Luis Badilla, journalist and director of Il sismografo

The role of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal
Gianni Tognoni, General Secretary of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal

Debate with the audience

Chaired by Nicoletta Dentico, Lelio and Lisli Basso ISSOCO Foundation

13:30 – 14:00 – Closing session

Peoples’rights future
Franco Ippolito, President of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal

It is necessary to confirm participation in the conference: to this end, please send a mail to the conference secretariat by 24th June 2016

According to Parliamentary rules, participants must produce their identity card /passport to have access to the conference venue. It is compulsory for men to wear a jacket.

Simultaneous translations into English and Spanish will be available throughout the two days of the conference.

Segreteriat of the conference:
Fondazione Basso
Tel. 06 6879953
email: basso@fondazionebasso.it

The Algiers Declaration: 
genesis, evolution and current status

On July 4, 1976, on the initiative of Lelio Basso, the Universal Declaration of Peoples’ Rights was adopted in Algiers. This was the outcome of a complex process, coinciding with the conclusion – with a few exceptions – of the thirty-year decolonization process, which had started at the end of the Second World War.
With the foundation of the United Nations in 1945, the reaffirmation of the “Nuremberg Principles” by the UN Assembly in 1946, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approved in 1948, a sort of revolution had taken place in the international order: the principles of peace, human rights and self-determination had become a part of international law.
However, due to the lack of an effective international jurisdiction to guarantee respect for this profoundly altered international order, the “International War Crimes Tribunal” was set up in 1966. This opinion tribunal, founded by Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre, with the participation of well-known intellectuals and law experts of the time, including Lelio Basso, became known as the Russell Tribunal. A similar institution was set up on the initiative of Lelio Basso, the so-called “Russell Tribunal II on Latin America”, active from March 1974 to January 1976. This institution had a vast impact and stimulated large scale support.
From the experience of these two original initiatives stemmed the conviction that it had become necessary to draft a text collecting the norms and the principles, deriving from the interpretation of international law in force at the time, based on which the opinion tribunals had operated. The purpose of the text would be to lay these norms and principles out in a coherent and systematic way.
The Algiers conference, promoted by the Lelio Basso International Foundation for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, and by the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, arose from the collaboration of law experts, economists and politicians, coming from both industrialized and developing countries; of numerous non-governmental organizations, and also of important representatives of the international movement for the promotion of peoples’ rights.
Algiers was chosen for specific reasons: Algiers was a strategic reference point for the non-aligned countries; it was the capital of a nation that had fought hard for its independence, in a continent that had many countries still fighting for their political and economic independence. The date in which the Declaration was published was chosen because it coincided with the bicentenary of the Philadelphia Declaration, in which the representatives of the thirteen English colonies approved the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America written by Thomas Jefferson, proclaiming their right to be free and independent from the English Crown.
This is how the Universal Declaration of the rights of peoples came into being. It was immediately signed by over 80 political and cultural figures around the world. Starting from the belief that “the effective respect for human rights implies respect of the rights of peoples”, the Algiers Declaration lists people’s rights in thirty articles that codify the right to a national and cultural identity, the right to self-determination, economic rights, the right to culture, the right to the environment and to common resources, minority rights and the guarantees to these rights.
The Algiers Declaration is the basis for activity of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, active since 1979, imagined by Lelio Basso as a forum allowing peoples to speak. With its 42 sessions dedicated to the violation of human rights in various parts of the world, the PPT has become a practical observatory monitoring the validity, relevance, weakness, impotence, need for and possibility of renewing the principles that had inspired it. A laboratory interpreting international law and the unacceptability of impunity for its violation.