Piero Basso

in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos, n. 8 (October 1986)

On 4 July 1976, the 200th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, exponents of liberation movements, jurists, and progressive personalities from all over the world created the ‘Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples’ in Algiers. This document is the first to give a complete formulation to the notion of the ‘rights of peoples’, variously present in many previous texts (from the American Declaration of Independence to the Jacobin Constitution of 1793, from the 1917 Declaration of the Peoples of Russia to the 1966 UN Declaration on the Independence of Colonies), and it is also the first to introduce, alongside political and economic self-determination, the new concept of co-responsibility and collective rights of peoples, to peace, to the environment, to the development in solidarity of all. Although not supported by any state, the ‘Declaration’ came to the attention of many international law scholars and was largely incorporated into the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1981).
Ten years have passed since that 1976, and the strength of peoples’ struggles has increasingly imposed the notion of ‘peoples’ rights’ in the collective consciousness, even if not yet at an ‘official’ level. And it is precisely this heightened awareness that makes its violations more obvious: foreign peoples in their own country, such as the Palestinians or the South African Blacks; peoples driven out of their own land by the millions, as in Afghanistan, Central America, the Horn of Africa; peoples subjected to brutally repressive regimes, as in so many African, Asian and Latin American countries.
But the most serious attacks and threats to the rights of peoples, of all peoples, occur not only in these extreme cases but in the ‘normality’ in which we live every day. The worsening and extension of the area of hunger, a phenomenon unknown in this dimension until some twenty years ago, the growing impact of foreign debt against every prospect of development in so many Third World countries, the dramatic increase in unemployment and underemployment as an apparently ‘natural’ consequence of technological progress, the arms race that threatens not only the future of mankind, but its very present, shrinking the spaces of democratic life, subtracting enormous resources from development, imposing military governments on the weakest countries, are all attacks on the rights of peoples. It is quite clear that all these phenomena represent an increasingly serious danger for the democratic development of all societies, and for the very maintenance of the spaces of democracy that peoples have won.
In the face of this escalation of international tensions, the Declaration of the Rights of Peoples might appear as a mere piece of paper, a list of good intentions. This is not so, and for several reasons.
In the meantime, the Declaration represents an organic point of reference that makes it possible to make precise choices in the field; in a political landscape in which Realpolitik prevails all too often, not to say show-politics or the mere pursuit of power, a solid anchorage for reading and interpreting events is in itself a political fact; all too often the Italian left has experienced that there are no easy shortcuts, and that tactical expedients risk turning into setbacks from which it is then difficult to climb back. Secondly, the insistence on the rights of peoples, as a hundred or two hundred years ago on individual rights, contributes, albeit slowly and laboriously, to the maturing of consciences, to making the contrast between reality and statements of principle ever more evident, and the current system of international relations ever less acceptable; in other words, it contributes to conquering the depths of consciences for the cause of change, the only terrain on which our weapons, which are those of reason and the heart, are superior to those of those who, as Allende said, ‘have the strength but not the reason’.
Finally, the strong affirmation of the right to self-determination, in all its aspects, the call for democracy, for participation, make the Declaration also a directly political instrument at the service of the peoples’ struggle, the indication of a terrain of initiative destined to become increasingly important. For those who believe in the current validity of the Marxian vision of socialism as the passage from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, as the full affirmation of man, of his right to participate in all aspects of social and political life, to build, together with all the other men and women who make up a people, his own future, it seems to us that the call to the rights of peoples is a necessary moment in this perspective.
Basso, Piero
in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos, n. 8 (October 1986)