Matteo Mecacci

Mr Matteo Mecacci, 34, is a member of the Italian Parliament.

Elected in the general elections of April 2008, he is a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Italian Chamber of Deputies and of the Italian delegation to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly. In July 2009 he was elected Rapporteur of the Committee on Human Rights of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly.

He is chairperson of the Italian Inter-parliamentary Group on Tibet, which is composed by more than 120 parliamentarians. He organised the 5^th World Parliamentary Conference on Tibet at the Italian Chamber of Deputies from 18 to 19 November 2009.

He is Vice-President of and represents at the United Nations the non-violent trans-national and trans-party Radical Party, a non-governmental organisation with consultative status at the ECOSOC.

He graduated in Law at the University of Florence with a international law dissertation on the International Criminal Court.

From 2001 to 2008, he lived in New York where he coordinated several campaigns at trans-national level – focussing on United Nations activities- and aimed at promoting democracy and the protection of human rights such as:

·        the establishment of the International Criminal Court;

·        coordinating the participation of human rights advocates within United Nations bodies, such as the UN Human Rights Commission and, later on, the UN Human Rights Council;

·        the campaign aimed at creating a World Organisation of Democracy and of Democracies;

·        the campaign for a universal death penalty moratorium that led to the adoption by the UN General Assembly, on 18 December 2007, of a resolution urging a universal moratorium on the death penalty supported by more than 100 countries.

Over the past years, he has participated in numerous governmental and non-governmental conferences in different countries worldwide on topics related to the promotion of democracy and the protection of human rights.