Emma Bonino advances human rights and international justice
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Emma Bonino, an Italian politician, dedicated her career to both domestic civil rights advocacy and international humanitarian diplomacy.
Between 1979 and 2006, she served multiple terms as a Member of the European Parliament. In 1994, as European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid, Bonino transformed a bureaucratic office into a rapid-response team, intervening in crises like the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and conflicts in the Balkans.
She prioritized humanitarian aid during these conflicts, even bypassing bureaucratic delays to deliver essential supplies like blankets and medicine to Sarajevo during its siege. Bonino also travelled to Kabul in 1997, at a time when Western governments largely ignored the Taliban regime, to protest gender apartheid and the exclusion of women from public life.
She then worked to establish a permanent international court to punish war crimes, founding the ‘Non c’è pace senza giustizia’ (There is no peace without justice) NGO and pushing the United Nations to create the International Criminal Court, which formally came into being with the Rome Statute in 1998. Later, Bonino served as Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2013, having previously held a ministerial position from 2006 to 2008.
In this role, she addressed the complexities following the Arab Spring and the early stages of the migration crisis, consistently advocating for European integration and multilateralism. Throughout her career, Bonino positioned herself as a champion of human rights, arguing they should be a daily political priority.
