Léo Matarasso

in Un tribunal pour les peuples, Paris, 1983

Speech given at the evening tribute to Lelio Basso at the Sorbonne, 20 February 1979

I met Lelio Basso in November 1966, in London, during the constitutive meeting of the Russell Tribunal against American war crimes in Vietnam. He was one of the international personalities who responded favorably to Bertrand Russell’s call (like Jean-Paul Sartre and Laurent Schwartz) to form a tribunal to judge these crimes.
I can still see him as he appeared to me that day, with his mischievous eyes and his goatee, then salt and pepper, which made him look like a Garibaldian fighter. He sat opposite me, Sartre and Isaac Deutscher, leaning in from time to time towards one or the other and making them smile with a few kind words. Very soon Lelio Basso appeared to me not only as a man of prodigious analytical insight, but also as having an astonishing sense of humor, which he never lost even in the most tragic circumstances.
I had been asked to prepare the legal structures of the tribunal. I came to London with a draft charter for the tribunal. Some people found my text a little too “legalistic”, but Lelio immediately intervened to support me and, after a short debate, my draft was adopted with a few changes of detail.
From that day on, Lelio Basso and I developed a friendship that has grown stronger and stronger during our many meetings around the world, as well as in the famous library of his beautiful house in Via Dogana Vecchia in Rome. Our last meeting was in Paris, eight days before his death. He had come here for the day on Eritrea. We met there. Claude Bourdet was there, Edmond Jouve too. We spent the afternoon at Edmond Jouve’s house, where the film you are about to see was to be shot. We parted and agreed to meet the following Saturday, December 16, 1978 in Rome. Indeed, a committee chaired by our friend François Rigaux had organized, on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, a tribute to Lelio Basso at the Capitol in Rome. The tribute took place as planned, but without Lelio Basso, who died that very morning. The day before, he had been slightly ill in the Senate. He was taken to hospital for observation. He fell asleep with the first copy of the large book of Mélanges published in his honour in his hand. He did not wake up. A few days later, on Christmas Day, he would have been seventy-five years old. In fact he was born, somewhere in Liguria, on Christmas Day 1903. He studied law and philosophy at the University of Milan. In 1921, when he was not yet eighteen, he joined the Italian Socialist Party. But the dark years of Fascism soon followed. In 1928, as a young lawyer, he was deported (confined), one of those islands in the Mediterranean where Mussolini sent his political opponents. On his return from deportation, he resumed the clandestine struggle, then founded the so-called “Popular Unity” movement, wrote in the clandestine press, most often under the pseudonym of Spartacus, and was one of the leaders of the Milanese insurrection at the Liberation.
He rejoined the Socialist Party and was its secretary general from the end of 1947 to the beginning of 1949. He then gave up his position to Pietro Nenni. But when, a few years later, the Italian Socialist Party practised the so-called “centre-left” opening, he left it to found a new party, the PSIUP, a sort of Italian PSU. He left the latter in 1968 and remained, from that date until his death, an independent socialist.
He has been a member of the Italian Parliament without interruption since the Constituent Assembly of the Republic, sometimes as a deputy, sometimes as a senator. He was one of the fathers of the Constitution of the Italian Republic and the author of the famous article 3 which states:
It is the duty of the Republic to remove the economic and social obstacles which, by limiting the freedom and equality of citizens, prevent the full development of the human person and the effective participation of workers in the political, economic and social organization of the country.
At the same time as he was carrying out this intense Italian political activity, he was directing his thought and action in two other directions. On the doctrinal level, he soon emerged as an important theoretician of socialism, and on the international level he became an ardent defender of the cause of the peoples.
As a socialist and Marxist theorist, he published numerous books and hundreds of articles, notably in the International Review of Socialism, which he founded and directed from 1964 to 1968. His death came as a surprise when he was putting the finishing touches to a fundamental work containing the essence of his thinking on Marxism and its aftermath, which was to be published in Germany. It is to be hoped that, although the last chapter was left unfinished, the book will see the light of day, for it is a work of great importance for the understanding of our time¹.
He had built up an extraordinary library devoted mainly to revolutionary history, from the French Revolution to the revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. I was told that he had the most important collection of books and original documents on the French Revolution outside France. He left all his archives concerning revolutionary history and socialism to a foundation that bears his name and that of his wife Lisli, the ISSOCO, Institute for the Study of Contemporary Societies, which is to be attached to the University of Rome.
Finally, Lelio Basso became passionate, at the end of the war, for the cause of the liberation of peoples. He was first attracted to the peoples of the former Italian colonies: Libya, Somalia, Eritrea. Then, during our battles here, for Viet Nam and Algeria, he was constantly at our side. It was with enthusiasm that he responded to Bertrand Russell’s call for the Tribunal against American war crimes in Vietnam. He was appointed, moreover, at the two sessions of this tribunal, first in Stockholm, then in Copenhagen, to make the final summary report preceding the deliberation and the decision. These two reports remain models of their kind.
The Russell Tribunal on Vietnam broke up with the decision that it would not deal with any other subject as long as the war in Vietnam lasted. A few years later, when the war in Vietnam was over, Lelio Basso was invited to Santiago de Chile by President Allende, where he met Brazilian refugees of all stripes who begged him to organize a Russell Tribunal on Brazil. He then obtained permission from the Russell Foundation to give this name to the new tribunal which, after the advent of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, was to become the Russell Tribunal II on Latin America.
At the end of the third and final session of the Tribunal, which had a great impact, especially in Latin America, Lelio Basso felt that such work could not be left without a follow-up. He then created, simultaneously, the Foundation for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples and the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples. You have noticed a slight difference in the name. It underlines the difference between the two enterprises. The Foundation is essentially a study and research organization; the League is an activist organization.
Shortly after its creation, the Foundation convened an international conference in Algiers which, on 4 July 1976, the 200th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, proclaimed the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples. Although this was a private initiative and although the concept of “peoples’ rights” was already scattered throughout a number of international instruments, this attempt was the first to formulate the rights of peoples in a single document. It can now be said that between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Charter of the United Nations, the charter of relations between states, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples is a document that many international lawyers consider to be fundamental.
At the end of his life, Lelio Basso was in the process of setting up a work even more ambitious than the previous ones. He imagined the creation of a permanent peoples’ tribunal. It is, of course, a court of public opinion, without any official character or power of sanction, but it has the claim to work with more rigor and seriousness than any official court.
I know that there is a lot of skepticism about the cause of the peoples at the moment. As a result of recent disappointments, many have come to ask what is the point of fighting for the liberation of peoples, if it only leads to the substitution of one power for another, one oppression for another. Some say that it is only worth fighting for the cause of human rights, as if there were an opposition between human rights and the rights of peoples, as if man were an abstract entity, living outside a people, outside time and space, outside history, as if one had to subordinate the support one gives to a people struggling for its liberation to the guarantee that, once liberated, it will respect human rights. Respect for human rights requires respect for the rights of peoples. The latter are the necessary, but unfortunately not sufficient, condition for the former.
Those of us who experienced the Resistance against the Nazi occupation know very well that the liberation of the French people was the indispensable condition for the restoration of human rights in France.
Louis Joinet, with his great international experience, will speak to you better than I can about this problem of the relationship between human rights and the rights of peoples. Let me simply recall Article 7 of our Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples:
All people are entitled to a democratic system of government representing all citizens without distinction as to race, sex, creed or colour and capable of ensuring effective respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all.
Lelio Basso never admitted the contradiction that some people want to see between human rights and the rights of peoples. He fought all his life for a society of free and equal men in a world of free and equal peoples.

1 The book in question was published in Italy under the title Socialismo e Rivoluzione, Feltrinelli editore, Milano, 1980.

in: Un tribunal pour les peuples, Paris, 1983