Marco Pannella was born in Teramo in 1930, graduated in law and is a professional journalist. At 20 he was the university leader of the Liberal Party, at 22, President of the UGI, the student lay forces union, at 23, President of the National University Students Union (UNURI). At 24 he promoted the foundation of the Radical Party, together with a prestigious group of intellectuals and Democrat, Liberal and Socialist politicians. The Radical Party began its activity in 1956: Pannella immediately became seriously committed, apart from a gap between 1960 and 1963, in which he worked in Paris as a journalist for "Il Giorno". He was among the Founders of the League for Conscientious Objection, the abrogation of the Concordat between the Church and the State, which had been an aim of the Fascist regime, of the Centre for Juridical Initiative "Piero Calamandre", of the AIED, the association for demographic education, and he was in the first ranks for the reforms, (which were obtained) of drug legislation, elec

toral laws for the right to vote at the age of eighteen, and the laws concerning mental hospitals.

Engaged in the defence of human and civil rights, in 1968 he was arrested at Sofia, after organising demonstrations defending the Czechoslovakian people in other Warsaw Pact cities.

But twelve years earlier, he had already promoted and organised the welcome in Italy of hundreds of Hungarian students from the Austro-Hungarian frontier, and from Vienna.

Among the first to organise the Green and Ecologist movements in Europe, he seriously committed himself to the moralisation of public life, against the public financing of political parties and against the corruption of the world of the partitocracy; together with the Radical Party, he organised at least twenty campaigns to collect requests for referendums on all the topics of social and political life, especially those relating to rights.

Disciple and friend of Altiero Spinelli since 1949, he was a confirmed Federalist, and today is committed to conceiving a new non-violent mass commitment to promote European Union, in the hope that by so doing it will be possible to respond to the "Gandhian miracle" of the unity and independence of India.

For his non-violent battles, he has been tried, stopped and even arrested hundreds of times, but has always been acquitted, with the exception of having to pay a fine for a press offence.

He has often been elected as town councillor for Rome, Naples and Trieste and since he has been a candidate to the Chamber of Deputies, twice elected to the Senate, and twice to the European Parliament.

He has carried out numerous hunger strikes, even thirst strikes, not only in Italy but more or less everywhere in Europe, to obtain new laws for civil and human rights, against extermination by hunger in the world.

He is the author of the Manifesto Appeal of the Nobel Prizewinners against hunger, which today has been signed by a hundred Nobel Prizewinners, and of the resolution approved by the European Parliament on September 30, 1981, which brought in new laws in Italy and Belgium, against extermination by hunger in the world.

In January 1987, he stood as a candidate for the presidency of the European Parliament, gaining 61 votes.