Salvatore Senese
in Léo Matarasso, Seminario del 6 dicembre 2008, Cedetim, Parigi
Henriette and I will not be able to be with you on the occasion of the meeting dedicated to the memory of Léo Matarasso and the teachings he left us.
We regret it very much because Léo is among those who have marked our youth.
He taught us that one way to give meaning to life is to discover the enrichment that comes from others; especially from the commitment to fight for the rights of others, peoples and individuals, people we do not know but who become familiar to us through their sufferings and struggles.
And he taught us to find in this the joy of living, feeling part of a humanity that goes beyond us and understands us, that links generations and allows us to think about history.
We knew Léo – whose humorous wisdom stayed with us until his death – during the preparation and then the sessions of the Russell Tribunal II for Latin America, an undertaking conceived by Lelio Basso to give voice to those whose rights and dignity were being violated and who were ignored by official institutions.
Léo’s collaboration with Lelio continued in the creation of the system that Lelio’s genius devised to provide stable cultural, institutional and organizational reference points for all those who wish to join forces in the struggle for human and peoples’ rights.
These landmarks are called: Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples adopted in Algiers on 4 July 1976, International Foundation for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples.
All these undertakings were marked by Léo’s lucid and rigorous contributions, which were nourished by the experience he had accumulated in the networks of the resistance to the Nazis, in the anti-colonial struggles – Algeria, Vietnam, Palestine – and in his fight for human rights.
So many fields that had taught him the variety of situations that can offend the dignity of women and men, because – as he liked to repeat – situations of oppression are multiple and often intertwined: they affect man’s relationship to work and to the world of production, but also the relationship to nature and the environment; the lack of essential goods for survival, but also the framing in a hierarchical and expropriating society; family relationships, but also relationships between the sexes; the relationship to political power, but also the relationship to the innumerable places of power that every society secretes; the relationship of the individual to the group to which he belongs, but also the disintegration of all community ties; the relationship to tradition, but also the relationship to different cultures; the relationship to the State, but also the lack of State or the fragmentation of power into a thousand feudalities and corporations. In short, he taught us that everything that has to do with the multiple aspects of the human condition and its ineliminable collective dimension can constitute an object of oppression and, consequently, become a ground for liberation. And so this is not the prerogative of a single subject, but finds its own subjects in each concrete context, which differ from one nation to another, from one context to another.
This avoids the mistake of ignoring the difficult paths through which liberation can be achieved, and also avoids taking the results of the evolution of a part of humanity as absolute goals of liberation.
It is this open and informed view that Léo brought to the work of the many sessions of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal where he sat as a judge – Zaire, Guatemala, East Timor, Afghanistan I, Afghanistan II, Argentina – leaving his mark in the sentences that concluded them.
More generally, he taught us to combine the rigour of the true jurist with the passion of the defender of human and peoples’ rights and the breadth of horizons of the observer of international reality. And at a time when commitment was often divided into two opposing camps – on the one hand, the defenders of the rights of peoples and, on the other, the defenders of human rights – he was one of those who opened the way to a commitment that considered the two fronts of struggle inseparable.
Above all, he was a precious teacher for the young generations of jurists who gathered around the charismatic figure of Lelio Basso. For he taught us, with self-righteousness and brilliance, to temper, with the rigour of a jurist, our militant ardour against oppression. The phrase with which he used to introduce his “calls to order” has become a classic in the Basso system: “the little Cartesian that I am…”. This is how he would begin the interventions that gave our drafts the dignity of a solid and convincing legal discourse. There was, of course, the great lawyer who deserved the respect of judges and opponents, but there was also something deeper, a cultural trait, because he was convinced that the law can become a weapon in the service of the weak and the oppressed and that therefore it should not be trivialized or undermined, but – on the contrary – that it must be “taken seriously”; This in no way implied that the texts should be ossified or that they should not be given a new meaning and scope in relation to those which tradition had given them. He was well aware that norms are expressed in words and that to each word is attached an excess of meaning that always appeals to the intelligence of the interlocutor; that it is therefore a matter of working on this excess as well as on the culture, feelings, and idealities of the interlocutors in order to “lead the texts beyond the boundaries that States, which are essentially restrictive, impose on them,” as he often liked to repeat to us.
In this undertaking, he drew on his great historical culture and his cosmopolitan experience, which he generously shared with us.
Thus, until the last years of a long and full life, his commitment and generosity were expressed with the lightness of a dance step that covered the seriousness and depth of his feelings.
Senese, Salvatore
in: <strong>Léo Matarasso,
Seminario del 6 dicembre 2008, Cedetim, Parigi
Milano, maggio 2009</strong>