RESST observers are organisations and experts committed to the prevention of torture, without directly running rehabilitation programmes for survivors. With their contribution, they enrich the debate, foster knowledge exchange and strengthen our advocacy actions. Find out who they are and their role in our network.
A Buon Diritto
A Buon Diritto is an independent association active since 2001 that deals with the protection of civil and social rights. It provides legal assistance to migrant people, asylum seekers and refugees, and stateless people.
For years, A Buon Diritto has followed cases of people subjected to abuse or torture by police forces, providing concrete support to the families of the victims and carrying out advocacy and public awareness activities.
The association also conducts research activities on deprivation of liberty and violations of human rights in Italy. A Buon Diritto aims to raise public awareness on the issue of protecting fundamental freedoms.
Amnesty International
Amnesty International is a global movement of people that, since 1961, in every part of the world, through campaigns to raise public awareness and mobilise public opinion, to educate, to collect signatures and to put pressure on institutions defends and promotes human rights for all. Always committed to the fight against torture in all parts of the world, Amnesty International launched its first worldwide campaign against torture in 1977 with the Stockholm Conference. In the early 1980s, Amnesty International representatives, led by Nigel Rodley (at that time legal advisor to the association, later UN Special Rapporteur against Torture and Chairman of the UN Human Rights Committee), made an important contribution to the drafting of the UN Convention against Torture and Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which was approved by the General Assembly in 1984. In the early 1990s, Amnesty International Italy first wrote to all parliamentarians calling for the introduction of a specific crime of torture in the Criminal Code with a view to the full implementation of the 1984 Convention.
Since the late 1990s and until the entry into force of the law on torture in Italy in 2017, Amnesty International Italy, together with Antigone and other civil society organisations, has intensified its efforts to obtain the introduction of the crime of torture in Italy, through letters, public meetings, hearings, conferences, mobilisations and declarations.
Antigone
Since 1991, Antigone has been promoting and protecting the rights of people deprived of their liberty, as well as raising cultural and political awareness in the penal and penitentiary fields. It collects and disseminates information on the prison situation, takes care of the preparation of legislative proposals and the definition of any lines of amendment to proposals in the process of approval, provides advice and, where necessary, also legal protection, to detainees on issues relating to the execution of sentences. The Association has its headquarters in Rome and develops its action also thanks to a network of regional offices. Antigone carries out – at a national, European and international level – research activities on the issues of punishment and guarantees in the penal and penitentiary system. Antigone’s information materials are a point of reference in the area for students, citizens, police forces, university researchers, the judiciary, local authorities and voluntary associations. Antigone carries out advocacy activities at a local, national and international level on the issues of the rights of people deprived of their liberty. There are many campaigns carried out over the years, including the one for the abolition of life imprisonment. Antigone’s campaigns are responsible, among others, for the introductory laws of the National Guarantor of Persons Deprived of Liberty and of the crime of torture in the Italian Penal Code, as well as the presentation of thousands of appeals to the European Court of Human Rights that led to the condemnation of Italy in the famous “Torreggiani ruling”.
S.I.M.M.
The Italian Society of Migration Medicine (SIMM) was founded in 1990 on the initiative of several associations in various parts of Italy that were concerned with guaranteeing the right to healthcare for immigrants, at a time when the right to health was largely denied. Today, SIMM is a scientific society that aims to promote the right to health for immigrants in Italy, support research in the field of migration medicine and spread knowledge on the subject of immigrant health through training activities, conferences, congresses and publications, under the motto “Dignitas in salute, salus in dignitate”.
