On 4 July 1976, a large assembly of representatives of liberation movements, exiles from military dictatorships (those in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina were at their peak), international jurists, and economists approved the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples in Algiers, conceived as a necessary complement to the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Fifty years on, in a profoundly changed world, this is not a time for celebration. Rather, it is an opportunity for reflection. The memory we wish to preserve and share is directed towards the future. It is presented from the perspective of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, which was created to give practical effect to the Declaration by hearing the concrete experiences of the many peoples who have turned to it in search of justice.
A premise that connects the original context to the present day
Lelio Basso’s decision to choose Algiers on 4 July was among the outcomes of the debates and proposals on the future of international law that emerged from the Sessions of the Russell Tribunal II on Latin American dictatorships (Rome, Brussels and Rome, 1974–1976), which had reached a clear conclusion: the end of formal colonialism, marked by the independence of the last Portuguese colonies and by the United States’ defeat in Vietnam, called for a radical rethinking of the concept of the rights of peoples and of their struggles for self-determination, moving beyond general recommendations and principles. This change could begin with a combined reading of two realities that have since been turned into seemingly unquestionable assumptions of State policy.
July 4 coincided with the bicentenary anniversary of US independence, celebrated as the founding moment of the democracy presented as a model for the entire world. It was important to reclaim the memory of this day by recalling the origins of a society founded on profound racial inequalities and characterised by discriminatory practices both internally and internationally through the exercise of military and economic power. The Vietnam War, which ended in the defeat of US military intervention, and the consolidation of dictatorships in Latin America — politically and militarily supported by the United States — provided further evidence that international law was repeatedly interpreted and applied in the service of dominant powers
The second reality, closely connected with the first, was even more radical. The peoples to whom the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had solemnly granted inviolable rights had rapidly been pushed to the margins of the evolution of international law. At an international level and in the most diverse national contexts, the formal legality claimed by States prevailed over the legitimacy of peoples’ struggles for the self-determination of peoples. This occurred while new forms of economic and military colonialism no longer required territorial occupation in order to exercise domination.
There was another important development: multinational corporations were disregarding any constraints arising from the international human rights order and becoming allies of any strategy aimed at expanding the market, on the military, economic and cultural levels. As early as 1975, the Russell Tribunal II had documented the role played by multinational enterprises in providing economic, political and even repressive support to dictatorial regimes in countries such as Brazil and Chile, fostered by the substantial impunity guaranteed by international law, which lacked a competent and independent judicial instance capable of recognising the voice of the people and ensuring justice. The only hope was therefore placed in the legendary miller who, faced with the arbitrariness of absolute power, trusted in the existence of an independent judge, as expressed in the famous saying, “There are still judges in Berlin”.
The memory of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal
Since that lucid diagnosis, the history that has unfolded has been narrated by a body with limited resources but a constant commitment: the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, which has made the Algiers Declaration the foundation of its institutional and operational mission, establishing itself as a public tribunal and giving voice to victims of violations.
Evidence, beyond any reasonable doubt, of individual, systematic, and structural responsibilities is assessed according to procedures inspired by judicial process, culminating in a rigorously reasoned, documented, and public judgment. While not imposing penalties, the judgements identify those responsible and contribute to justice by establishing the truth about events in the history of real peoples, often obscured by silence and the collusion of formal powers.
Even reading the titles of the judgments published on the PPT website (there are now 57, covering half a century of peoples’ struggles for rights) reveals the troubled evolution of international law and its inability to uphold the rights of peoples. While the names, roles, and public or private identities of those who produce victims through crimes against humanity, war crimes, and systematic violations of the right to life may change, the exclusion, denial, and erasure of legitimate subjects of fundamental rights from the possibility of having those rights recognised, exercised, and repaired remains constant.
Even when the International Criminal Court became operational between the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, the complicit silence of States and international bodies continued to be part of a system of impunity that everyone officially recognised as unacceptable and indicative of a lack of civilisation. However, this system found its guarantor, whether direct or indirect, in the powers of the moment. No matter how strong the evidence of responsibility, even in cases involving the most serious international crimes.
The path of the PPT coincides with the peoples’ extraordinary ability to affirm their rights and dignity, refusing to accept what their oppressors decide as their destiny, through the continuity of their resistance and the creativity of their resilience.
Three sessions deserve to be briefly recalled for their particular relevance.
In 1988, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the PPT held a session on the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in West Berlin, at the initiative of European and international movements. While their institutional mission was to promote universal access to fundamental rights, their practices produced and imposed development models that made human rights dependent on the availability of resources and criteria of sustainability. This effectively reduced them to instruments for the implementation of predetermined economic policies.
In 1992, in commemoration of the fifth centenary of the so-called “discovery” of America, a self – convened session highlighted how the foundations of international law had been established at that time and how they provided the greatest genocide in history with names and justifications that transformed it into an act of civilisation and evangelisation — an original sin that has resisted any attempt at redemption.
In contrast to the historic prohibitions of war that had characterised international and constitutional law in the post-World War II period, the rehabilitation of war in 2003 was seen as crossing a frontier that denied the very civilisation of law. Those in power may, regardless of any evidence, declare the destruction of those defined as “enemies” to be a legitimate, if not mandatory, operation in defence of any value.
The steps just recalled and addressed by the PPT in real time through concrete analyses, decisions and recommendations are clearly the path that led to the current legal situation. However, one final observation remains central: a scenario that dominates not only reality, but also contemporary imaginaries, which forces us to question the future, where only the most difficult questions are certain.
Over these last fifty years, genocide has accompanied the stories of peoples, acting as an officially unnameable common denominator of all crimes that deny the right of human groups considered threats, enemies, or obstacles to the models of life imposed by the prevailing power to exist: the desaparecidos in Argentina, the indigenous populations of Guatemala, the memory of the Armenian people, East Timor, Tamil Eelam and the Indigenous peoples of Canada, to name just a few of the many cases examined by the PPT. Gaza today represents the latest and most radical synthesis of this story, as evidenced by the recent report on the “execution” of its children. It is a doubly inhuman situation, both for the lucidity with which it was planned and executed, for the perversion of the connivance and alliance of the international community, as well as the now resigned impotence of its mechanisms of control.
The “ongoing genocide” is now a daily news story. The openly displayed desire to make genocide an unpunished instrument of geopolitics would ultimately risk turning it into an increasingly normalised fact.
There is increasing evidence of other crimes – genocidal or crimes against humanity – that affect other peoples: the highly visible and global extermination of migrants; the less visible and therefore more easily ignored extermination of victims recorded in statistics on avoidable deaths, mostly children, due to hunger and inequality; the extermination of populations involved in conflicts fuelled by the arms trade, as in Sudan; the extermination of communities affected by extractive industries in the Congo, once again with children among the main victims; and the extermination of minorities in their various forms, ethnic and otherwise: the Rohingya, the Kurds, and Afghan women.
A time of difficult questions
The Algiers Declaration represented an era in which, beyond all conflicts and interests, the underlying belief was that constitutions such as the Italian one, as well as international declarations and conventions promoted by the United Nations, were imperfect yet constituted open projects of research and comparison. Despite contradictions and setbacks, they were oriented in a recognisable direction: the progressive expansion of rights.
As the Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano, a voice of magical realism and resistance to dictatorships, recalled, history is not made of utopias in the sense of the unachievable. Utopias, by definition, are a horizon towards which to walk. The people were to be the protagonists of this permanent journey, without illusions but without renunciation: a path to be shared and continually rethought, equal to the challenges of each time.
The most profound novelty recounted by the group of people who recognised themselves in the Declaration can be summarised, paradoxically, by the increasingly regressive nature of the evolution of international and humanitarian law. In fact, its structural foundations have been strengthened, as the existence of international courts reminds us. However, it is equally evident that the role of law as a reference point has progressively diminished, not only in its implementation but also, more profoundly, in the imagination and self-legitimisation of those in power. The adoption of war as an essential component of diplomacy and a dominant force in the economy is one of the clearest expressions of this transformation of political power.
As mentioned above, Gaza sums up the other, even more radical form of emptying: genocide can — indeed, for many, it must — become part of the perception of power even before its practices. And, not in the background but at the centre and in an absolutely pervasive way, the most evident fact of this emptying emerges: the universal human rights to dignity and self-determination have in practice been eroded, as a few have violently appropriated economic and financial legality, recognising neither responsibility nor judgement. Inequality has become an inviolable rule: it is deplored and declared unacceptable, yet it continues to be upheld.
A necessary reminder
This is not the place for analyses of the future, whether more or less reliable. The Algiers Declaration is an even more timely reminder of the most fundamental right of peoples: not to be subjected to the interpretation of their history and, above all, their destiny by those who claim the right to control it. Geopolitical analyses, under a variety of names, only document the intolerable and inhumane violence that manages uncertainty, ambiguity, and chaos as a method of governance, mercilessly sacrificing the lives of real peoples in full lucidity and denial. The war in Ukraine is a complementary scenario to that of Gaza, demonstrating the erosion of international, humanitarian, political, and economic law. Human beings are disposable, and only formal apologies are offered, because there is nothing else that can be done.
The most complete answer about the future was given by the multitudes who identified with “Free Palestine” and the repression that followed. In spite of everything, they challenged the security logic of so-called democracies.
The massive demonstrations, which spanned age, context, and culture, were a call for visibility and representation of all those people who turn to concrete and symbolic minorities (such as those born in Algiers in the PPT tradition) to affirm their identity and the specificity of their existence. This is primarily a rejection of the oldest and most profound crime: silence. This is a rejection of the stories told by the settler-masters of history, whether through the use of AI or through physical environmental destruction (from the Amazon to Colombia and the Cerrado to West Papua, to name a few concrete examples), which document the close relationship between ecocides and genocides, and the fact that they remain unpunished.
Peoples are not a minority in history. Their future, which is profoundly different from that often presented as inevitable, is made possible by some global technical diagnoses and prognoses that have brought a seemingly simple term, justice, back to the centre. This word, despite its apparent vagueness, has concrete and precise implications. Rejecting the blackmail of “it is what it is” and TINA (There Is No Alternative) is the first fundamental step towards constructing possible alternatives.
The term “Rights of Peoples”, which was doctrinally, legally, and politically provocative, was recalled by the Algiers Declaration as a translation and objective of the “good intentions” of the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which identified peoples as the subjects of history. Tragically, its relevance remains intact today in the face of the inhuman regression of international law.
The visibility of the real lives of peoples and their transparent assertion of their rights, in the face of obstacles that seek to deny their identity as subjects and the urgent need for their rights to be recognised, remain the permanent criteria of a disenchanted memory and of the future.
Simona Fraudatario and Gianni Tognoni
This article in its original Italian form was published on Volere la luna on 3 July 2026. The translation from Italian to English was produced by Marta Fraticelli.