Today the “Right to Know” has been adopted in the Committee on Culture, Science, Education and Media of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, with a report, a resolution and a recommendation that now move to the Assembly’s final vote, where parliamentarians from the 47 countries stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals sit, representing the home of rights and democracy on the European continent. Thus a new human right is defined, one that intersects freedom and the quality of information, transparency of public acts, the quality of political and public debate, and the dissemination of the cultural tools that are indispensable for understanding, decoding, interpreting and ultimately choosing and deciding.
To know in order to deliberate. Being educated is the only way to be free. But culture is not a matter of degrees and notions, rather of tools. And the outlining of a new human right to knowledge seeks to define the necessary conditions, identifying the path to achieve them, committing every country and every community in this direction. In essence, the difference between Democracy and Dictatorship—especially and above all in its most insidious form of “democratorship”—lies not so much in the ritual of voting as in the substantive possibility to know, to understand, to discuss, to compare, to build together a position that is progressively different, new and original, born of debate and of encounter with the other, including the protection and enhancement of ideas that are numerically and temporarily in the minority.
The Right to Know thus finds its home and welcome in the institution that since 1947 has set itself the goal of safeguarding human rights and the rule of law, and was born as a space for discussion and confrontation, with ideas and words replacing weapons and tanks, seating in the same parliamentary chamber enemies of only a few months earlier in the symbolic city of Strasbourg, emblem of violence and separation. The Council of Europe and its Parliamentary Assembly were born and live in this way and continue along this path when, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, they gradually welcomed all the countries of the former Eastern European regimes, as well as Turkey, even hosting as observers representatives of Middle Eastern democracies and seeing, seated and debating in a parliamentary chamber, representatives of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.
Today a new democratic chapter begins with the identification of a fundamental pillar and, at the same time, a weak point. The Parliament of Parliaments thus embraces a long work of collective intelligence, born of the commitment of a large part of associations and civil society, starting with the Global Committee for the Rule of Law and the Right to Know, created within the Radical Party for this very purpose on the explicit initiative of Marco Pannella, and which has carried on that legacy under the leadership of its President, Ambassador Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata, and its Secretary, Matteo Angioli, the tireless driving force of the campaign, who has been able to weave multiple relationships in this direction. Also fundamental was the role of the Siracusa International Institute, presided over by the great Egyptian jurist Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni and, after his passing, carried on by Ezechia Paolo Reale.
Roberto Rampi