As happened in Figà-Talamanca, the home of Antonella Casu, treasurer of the NGO founded among others by Emma Bonino, was also checked
Two and a half months after the first arrests at Qatargate, on 21 February the Belgian federal prosecutor recalled that “There is no peace without justice”, whose offices in Brussels had been raided at the same time as the arrest of the secretary Niccolò Figà-Talamanca , also has an office in Rome and has sent investigators who, together with the Guardia di Finanza, have done the same in Trastevere.
As happened in Figà-Talamanca, arrested on 9 December 2022 and released unconditionally on 3 February 2023, the home of Antonella Casu was also searched, who is treasurer of the NGO also founded by Emma Bonino in 1993. The news report that documents have been seized and computer data cloned in search of the notorious traces of contacts with Qatar and Morocco, the heart of the prosecutor Michel Claise’s theorem according to which the NGOs “No Peace Without Justice” and “Fight Impunity” would be used by Panzeri and Co. to get money to Europe with the ultimate aim of bribing MEPs on matters relating to interests attributable to the two Arab countries.
The news is there and, as always happens, the way of presenting it confirms the superficiality and sloppiness of the story of the Roman investigations, the ungrammatical interpretation of the reconstructions as well as the fallacious attributions, corrected after hours, of responsibility and exaggerations in the headlines. Nothing new. And, just as mentioned several times here in relation to “There is no peace without justice”, nothing that could tarnish a story that will soon be 30 years in business with dozens of objectives achieved.
If over time Niccolò Figà-Talamanca has managed to (re)build the academic, professional and militant path in favor of respect for human rights and the fight against impunity – which began well before the meeting of an association called ( va) “Fight Impunity” – little is known about Antonella Casu.
However, anyone who has had the opportunity to associate with the Radical Party over the last 40 years knows who Antonella Casu is and can confirm – hopefully also publicly – that she is a meticulous person bordering on perfectionism, a great smoker as well as a great scrutinizer of the smallest detail and detail escaped by most but that makes the difference. It is probably for this reason that in 2008 Marco Pannella proposed her as secretary of the Italian Radicals, at a time when things in the “Radical house” were getting complicated despite the election of nine people on the Democratic Party lists.
Paradoxically, it was Casu himself who launched a national campaign for what Pannella called the “public register of elected officials, representatives and public officials”, a proposal for structural reform to make political activities, choices and behaviors public, as well as of incomes, of those who are professionally or electorally part of the institutions.
Before that election to an internal political office, for years Casu was the coordinator of the presidential secretariats of radical assemblies of all kinds and species, both national and international. Anyone who has even had the opportunity to go there by mistake knows that those assemblies were not flattering rallies of a guru, as they have often been told, but assemblies of political confrontations and clashes which, not infrequently, ended with last-minute psychodramas or regulatory disputes before the final vote on the general motion. Antonella Casu was Antonella Casu who for decades, maintaining an enviable calm despite the excess of nicotine, avoided slipping into procedural thickets.
In hours in which a tragicomedy relating to the final stages of +Europe has taken place, one might think that certain “administrative” decisions are the product (also) of the absence of political personnel trained thanks to congresses of members where the mileage motion was closed at dawn on the last day, to perhaps be amended shortly before the plenary vote, and where the signatures to present it were physically collected from those who wanted to read it in detail before signing it. Knowing what had to be done, language barriers were never a problem for Casu; in fact, even though we don’t speak French, it was thanks to Antonella Casu that in December 2007, with “Hands Off Cain” in a few days, we organized a conference against the death penalty in Africa in collaboration with the government of Gabon. The only constant in Antonella Casu’s political career has been that of acting behind the scenes without ever being thanked enough for the responsibilities she has been entrusted with and which she has fully honoured.
Following the publicity of the very serious accusations of corruption and money laundering that caused the Qatargate to explode, “There is no peace without justice / No Peace Withoutout Justice” has launched a thorough review of its financial statements of the last few years in search of possible administrative errors which, even remotely, could give rise to suspicions or gray areas. At the same time as this internal and external auditing, the association has dedicated days to relate to its historical and occasional donors to prevent its projects from undergoing sine die suspensions or being totally cancelled.In addition to concerns about the sustainability of the organization and its own reputation, there are those relating to who was the recipient of the analyses, documentations , criticisms or technical-juridical assistance that NPWJ coordinates in troubled areas of the world and, not infrequently, at the request of the United Nations with the economic support of the European Commission. The Belgian prosecution continues to keep secret many of the reasons why those involved are in fact involved; if the reason why “There is no peace without justice” has entered the eye of the storm is the suspicion that it has been a “vehicle” for the transit of money from non-European entities to Brussels and if the study, provided that there whether it was, of the financial statements filed with the European Parliament or the European Commission by virtue of the registration in the European transparency register, it was not enough, this further study will serve to clarify the modus operandi and the collaborations and supports of an association that fights against violations of human rights. When he was released on February 3, Niccolò Figà-Talamanca said he was ready to restart his activities to protect human rights that are increasingly trampled “close to home”. Closer than that…
Source: Huffington Post
