Dear Professor,

I am writing to thank you for the support that you have given to my political battle and my candidature in the Lista Bonino. To date, thirty Nobel Price Recipients in medicine, chemistry, physics, economics, together with tens and tens of scientists and researchers around the world have sustained and encouraged me to persevere.

In the last few days we have given to the press your names and your words of support. However, to date the Italian media has completely censored your position and your support, preventing Italian citizens from forming their own opinions on such an important issue, freedom of research, in particular on embryo stem cells.

The media silence on my candidature, the silence on your responses and support, as on other radical issues, is one of the instruments applied, and now being perfected as the elections approach, to annul and negate the constitutional rights of the Italian people. This is part of a strategy, of which we have documented evidence and which is about to culminate with the exclusion from the electoral campaign (and hence from the elections) of any possibility of debate and information on fundamental human, civil and political choices.

In Italy, institutions and powers, literally outside legality, are about to affirm themselves with a violence that does not even require physical aggression and murder: it is the violence of deliberately erasing the right to personal and political identity, and in this case, at least in part, also of your own.

This systematic violation cannot be further tolerated, lest we become accomplices ourselves. With Emma Bonino and radical friends we have decided to undertake more costly non-violent initiatives to attempt, in extremis, to give back to Italian citizens a modicum of information and democratic debate.

Therefore, as of tomorrow, Saturday 31 March, I will begin a permanent vigil -night and day- to call upon the President of the Republic, supreme guarantor of the constitutional rights of Italian citizens, to exercise his duty to defend the written Constitution and the Laws of the Republic, while Emma Bonino herself and other radical militants will begin a hunger strike for the same reasons.

I am writing to you, therefore, to inform you of those initiatives, and to invite you to follow their development, visiting the web page http://www.radicali.it, where you will also find the list of the supporters of these initiatives and their messages. We hope that you will let your voice be heard again on what is happening, in the forms that you will consider most appropriate.

Best regards,
Luca Coscioni
lucacoscioni@visto.com
Fax. +32-2-284.91.98 - +32-2-284.91.20 - +32-2-230.36.70