Elisabetta Zamparutti

The path

Since March 2016 she has been a member of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), a post for which the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe confirmed her for a second term in 2021 and a third in 2023. In that capacity she also represented the CPT at the fifteenth anniversary of the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture. Her commitment comes from the conviction that the threshold of inviolability of human dignity must keep rising against the power of the state: a commitment built through monitoring prison conditions and the treatment of people deprived of their liberty in prisons, juvenile detention centres, maximum security facilities, migrant centres and forensic psychiatric hospitals around the world.

She served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 2008 to 2013, where she sat on the Environment Committee and co-chaired the parliamentary «Free Iran» committee. In those years she promoted bills to shorten the limits of pre-trial detention, to establish the National Guarantor for the rights of persons detained and to abolish life imprisonment, tabling hundreds of parliamentary questions on detention conditions and environmental sustainability. Internationally she promoted the motion that led to suspending production of the thiopental destined for lethal injections in the United States. As co-chair of the Free Iran committee she supported the National Council of Resistance of Iran led by Maryam Rajavi, securing the removal of the PMOI from the European blacklist.

Since 2020 she has been a member of the board of Prison Insider and writes regularly for the newspapers Il Dubbio, Il Riformista and L'Unità on the death penalty, torture and detention conditions.

At Hands off Cain

She is Treasurer of the association, which she helped found in 1993, a post she has held since 2003.

Over the course of her work she has coordinated missions against the death penalty in dozens of countries, from Rwanda to Gabon, from Sierra Leone to Liberia, from Kenya to Jamaica, meeting Presidents, Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers. For over twenty years she edited the Hands off Cain Annual Report on the death penalty worldwide, as well as the association's international newsletter. She has designed and presented projects that have won the political and financial support of the European Union and of European governments. She coordinated the lobbying at the United Nations, in Geneva and in New York, that in 2007 led the General Assembly to adopt the Resolution for a universal moratorium on executions.

Since 2015 she has been founder and co-lead of «Spes contra spem – Laboratori di cambiamento», which brings a monthly programme of awareness to prisoners serving life sentences in the high security wings of the prisons of Opera, Parma, Rebibbia and Secondigliano, presented also at Oxford and at the European Court of Human Rights. Since 2022 she has led the delegations of Hands off Cain visiting prisons, bringing in other associations and reaching as many as 130 visits a year in Italy.

She believes that prison must not be a place of abandonment, nor mainly of punishment, but a space where the dignity of the person stays at the centre even when their liberty is suspended. Her secular work of mercy in visiting the «detenuti», the detained, and, as Marco Pannella would have said, the «detenenti», those who work inside the prison, comes from the same conviction that has driven Hands off Cain since 1993: to move beyond the gallows paradigm that saturates prison itself, and to support the growth of a restorative, or better still regenerative, justice, which should be seen as an important part of the global process of sustainable development, because it helps promote just, peaceful and inclusive societies.