Gustave Massiah
in Hommage à Léo Matarasso, Séminaire sur le droit des peuples, Cahier réalisé par CEDETIM-LIDLP-CEDIDELP, Février 1999
This extraordinary man had always given of himself.
He knew like no one else how to tell with his devastating humour the moments of great history in which he had participated. From Salonika, where he was born in 1911, to Toulouse, where he began his law studies, he forged his personality, which would be strong. He participated in so many battles! He actively participated in the resistance networks. He will be a great lawyer and will mark a generation of defenders and jurists. He was feared in press trials; he defended Les Lettres Françaises against Kravchenko. He will be one of the major lawyers of the anti-colonial struggles. He defended Henri Alleg, author of La Question; he had Maurice Papon convicted in 1963 for the illegal seizure of the first Libération.
Léo Matarasso will also put his immense culture and perseverance at the service of his commitment. He played an essential role in the Russell Tribunal and in the creation of the system imagined by Lelio Basso, including the Foundation, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal and the League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, which he chaired for so long.
“We are living in a time of great upheaval. This is the first sentence of the Charter for the Rights of Peoples, of which Léo was one of the main drafters, adopted in Algiers in 1976. This is still the case today.
Léo Matarasso had a philosophy of action that has marked generations: to lead the fight against barbarism head on and to explore new paths without getting discouraged.
Resistance to barbarism was the foundation of the anti-colonial struggles; it is more than ever relevant today. Léo Matarasso will be on all fronts, particularly in Algeria, Vietnam and Palestine.
In all difficult, unbearable and contradictory situations, he knew how to return to the essentials: respect for human rights and the rights of peoples, the intimate complementarity between individual and collective rights.
But Léo also knew how to take the measure of what was changing, of what was progressing, of the new that was emerging and shaking up the old world.
The Charter for the Rights of Peoples gave a large place to internal self-determination and to new rights. Economic, social and cultural rights, the right to the environment, respect for the rights of minorities, the right to peace.
Léo never failed to return to them, to remind them. The work of the tribunals of opinion has helped to raise awareness of these imperatives.
Our times are always contradictory. Barbarity is reborn in the world and resistance is more than ever the primary imperative. But there are reasons for hope. International law, despite all its limitations, is a prospect. Civil and political rights, like economic, social and cultural rights, are the references that are making progress in the face of the power of markets based on profits. Léo would have been happy to see the emergence of social forces that take up this struggle, this challenge, this project. His lucidity would have made him sense the immense dangers of the new period. But he would have been satisfied to see the new world citizen movement, with all its components, take up the action of those who have cleared the ground in the struggle for new rights.
These few contributions begin to bear witness to the struggles of the peoples of this century and to the adventure of those who have worked for the transformation of societies, for freedom of expression, for the defence of human rights and for the recognition of the rights of peoples.
Massiah, Gustave, Economiste, animateur du CEDETIM