Sergio D'Elia

The path

Sergio D'Elia's path began in the 1970s in the extra-parliamentary left and in armed struggle, and turned, in the early 1980s, into the movement of political dissociation from terrorism and a choice for nonviolence, which in 1986 led him to join the Radical Party, where he became a member of the Federal Secretariat. The gesture that marked his personal history most belongs to that turn: in January 1987, at the Radical Party congress, he symbolically handed Prima Linea, the violent organisation he had belonged to, over to the party of nonviolence, choosing to put into that cause the same energy he had given to armed struggle.

He served as a member of the Italian parliament, elected to the Chamber in April 2006 on the Rosa nel Pugno list and joining the Bureau of the Chamber. Among the most significant results of his parliamentary and nonviolent initiative during the 2006-2008 legislature are the passing of the indulto sentence remission law and the constitutional reform that removed every reference to the death penalty from the Italian Constitution, as well as, in December 2007, the adoption of the Resolution for a Universal Moratorium on executions by the United Nations General Assembly, a milestone in the worldwide abolitionist process.

Over the course of his work he has built deep expertise in first-hand documentation and reporting from death rows around the world, publishing articles and interviews in weeklies such as Panorama, L'Espresso, Gente, Oggi and Liberal, as well as in the main Italian and international newspapers; connected to that work is his collaboration on Oliviero Toscani's «We, on death row» campaign for Benetton, which gave a face and a voice to people sentenced to death in the United States and helped bring the campaign of Hands off Cain to international attention. He examined punishment, and the reality of the hard prison regime in Italy in particular, in the investigative book «Tortura Democratica – inchiesta sulla Comunità del 41 bis reale» (Marsilio, 2002).

At Hands off Cain

He is Secretary of the association, which he founded in 1993 with Mariateresa Di Lascia, his partner and a Radical member of parliament, who died in 1994 and who won the Strega Prize, Italy's principal literary prize, awarded posthumously in 1995 for her novel «Passaggio in Ombra».

He has also built experience in cultural and editorial work on detention. In 2015, with Ambrogio Crespi, he made the documentary «Spes contra spem – Liberi dentro», featuring prisoners sentenced to the «fine pena mai», the never-ending sentence, or life without parole, declared unlawful in 2019 by the European Court of Human Rights and the Italian Constitutional Court. In 2022 he published, with Hands off Cain, «Quando prevenire è peggio che punire. Torti e tormenti dell'inquisizione antimafia», on the system of preventive measures, prefectural anti-mafia bans and the dissolution of municipal councils for mafia infiltration. Since that year he has edited the association's book series: «La pena di morte nel mondo – Verso la fine dello Stato-Caino», «Pena di morte e morte per pena», «La fine della pena», «Non giudicare!», «Abolire – il carcere cimitero dei vivi». Since 2023 he has also edited the weekly Hands off Cain page in L'Unità.

He believes in a commitment founded on nonviolence and on the direct testimony of those who are, or have been, deprived of their liberty, in order to build a justice without vengeance, able as such to look beyond punishment and retribution and to build real paths of change and redemption. He is convinced that the way Cain is treated mirrors the way Abel is treated, and that prison is, as Filippo Turati said back in 1904, «a cemetery of the living». That is why the underlying goal, which he considers ever more urgent and current, is the abolition of prison: hic et nunc! The happy arc of his life: from wrong to right, from crime to law, from violence to nonviolence.