Gianni Tognoni
in Hommage à Léo Matarasso, Séminaire sur le droit des peuples, Cahier réalisé par CEDETIM-LIDLP-CEDIDELP, Février 1999
The experience of the TPP has even shown us that an excess of asserted rights is matched by their frequent, even systematic, violation. The IMF and the World Bank, as well as all the international organizations, note that the distance between the rich and the poor is increasing, but at the same time they confirm the model applied until now, which is bound to aggravate and even amplify this situation, making it irreversible.
The government of South Africa, for example, refused, for economic reasons, to provide children with care that would have allowed them to reduce the risk of being contaminated by AIDS. This would have cost as much as the care provided to 10 French people suffering from chronic hepatitis: these are facts that everyone knows, they are the subject of lively discussions, but no one is doing anything to change this situation.
We are in a very dangerous situation, where we have to believe that there is a specific will to give freedom to some, to select those who have the right to live, with impunity.
We find this same feeling of impunity with regard to the decisions of the TPP: politics has times that are not those of life, which can be interpreted as putting fundamental rights on hold. This is all the more serious because it creates a kind of systematic education, at the global level, in the culture of impunity: for example, we say that we want the Yugoslav war criminals to be arrested, but at the same time it is with them that we are dealing in international relations. This is what I call a “political education of impunity” that is directed at the citizens.
We are dealing with a form of structural impunity and an impunity that is the product of powerlessness.
At the court level, there are unresolved issues.
As we know, our courts only work on crimes that have already been committed. Is there any possibility of preventing crimes? Allowing economic laws to be planned that will ultimately produce harmful effects is a kind of crime of omission.
The courts are more or less convinced that they don’t have much power or capacity to prevent crimes or violations. But planning is about doing things in a way that reproduces what they do most harmfully. So we are planning the crimes.
In my work as a doctor, I see the most advanced line of assisted reproductive technology every day; if we calculate how much this technology costs, and its importance in the technological development project, we can see that it condemns those who cannot pay these prices not to enjoy its results for years and years. So there is a real market for rights in our societies.
The people and associations present here, as representatives of the civil society, say that this civil society is more and more important. It is true that the People’s Tribunal is a court of opinion and refers to the civil society, but I believe that we must ask ourselves whether this civil society is not, on the contrary, exempted from any decision-making power. The decisions that concern it (consumption model, etc.) are taken at another level and are imposed on it.
To take again the example of strict topicality of earlier, the European laws on assisted reproduction do not question at all the reality of this need; was it not, rather, the creation of an imaginary need? The laws on bioethics show that civil society is questioning itself, is interested in this “political battle”, but accepts that it does not know the terms of reference of this debate, i.e. nobody really knows what we are talking about. They ignore the problems that assisted reproduction creates, they are not interested in personal suffering, malformations … The debate remains at a strictly “political” level, and, in the end, they think they are taking democratic solutions.
The problem is therefore our representation of civil society in this operation of prevention and not only of judging crimes. So civil society should not only try crimes but also carry out preventive operations.
But then another question arises for those who work on this issue: with which experts should we ally ourselves to lead these preventive, cultural or doctrinal struggles? We have a duty to be the protagonists of a cultural debate, which implies alliances with jurists, economists, but also with scientists and technicians.
The latter two categories of experts are fewer in number than the former, and experience shows us that it is not easy to put together technical data and the assertion of rights. This is a real challenge.
An example: the fact that the TPP has proclaimed that Indian farmers have the right to choose, in an autonomous way, their agricultural model with regard to the global economic agreements of the Indian government with the multinationals, confronts a legal and political problem with technical information that does not allow for any alternative. This is the big problem in terms of concrete interventions, because there may be legal alternatives, but technical alternatives are not so easily available, which is a problem for the victims.
A final question, which concerns the difficulty that we have as a collective representative of civil society, and in particular for the Tribunal: the problem of continuity and complementarity of our action. The enthusiasm and the large number of interested people during the sessions of the Tribunals are followed by a strong dispersion of these energies immediately afterwards. Multinationals have a great continuity and capacity for integration, but we, who have great innovative capacities, lack this duty of complementarity and continuity.
There is also a problem of internal democracy in the groups working on the right of peoples: we have different points of view, and the dialectic between the groups working on the right of peoples must be developed.
For we must be able to develop a doctrine in a world that prefers to have a doctrine without dialectics. The different points of view of the South and the North, of the different peoples, offer the possibility of a contribution, at the cultural level, to the formation of a vision of the world that is not only passive and refuses the impossibility of change; they require groups such as ours to be capable of imagining a strategy of communication and discussion that will allow us to circulate the information that interests us throughout the world, but also to be able to dialogue with the official institutions, to show that the NGOs are indeed producers of knowledge and constitute a real reference.
The process described by Louis Joinet in relation to the Algiers Declaration (i.e. the bringing together of principles that were scattered and which have found a frame of reference for the future) must be the rule. Otherwise, we will continue to quote the statements of official bodies, which makes people believe that they are the only source of reference, when they are not always trusted. For example, the discussions on Guatemala quoted articles from United Nations documents, even though their content had already been developed by the Tribunal in 1983. Those who are interested in the rights of peoples must be aware that there is a presence other than that of the official bodies, and that it already exists. Tognoni, Gianni