Rita Bernardini

Background

Rita Bernardini was born in Rome on 27 December 1952. She joined the Radicals in 1975 and the following year founded the Fronte Radicale Invalidi, for the rights of people with disabilities. From 1983 to 1991 she worked with Radio Radicale.

In 1991 she coordinated the collection of signatures for nine referendums, and in 1995 the campaign for twenty. In 2002 she was among the founders of the Luca Coscioni Association, of which she is secretary. She was secretary of Radicali Italiani from November 2006 to June 2008 and again from 2013 to 2015.

Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in April 2008, she devoted her parliamentary term to criminal justice and to conditions in prisons, which she visited across Italy.

In Hands Off Cain

She is the association's president. She leads the visits to Italian prisons whose reports the association publishes: it is how the condition of the prisons is documented and made public, institution by institution.

She has led many nonviolent initiatives on conditions of detention: a hunger strike in February 2010, one of thirty-five days between November and December 2020 on prison overcrowding, and one of twenty-three days between January and February 2024, for the bill on early release.

It is the front the association calls death by punishment: the sentence that, in the way it is carried out, becomes a death sentence itself.