Vienna, Monday 15th October 2018
Lawfulness on stage: a theatre play on the occasion of the Conference of the Parties of the Palermo Convention
The ninth session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, also known as Palermo Convention, opened today at the United Nations Headquarters in Vienna.
The Conference is held every two years and aims at promoting the implementation of the Convention and the related Protocols on trafficking in persons, smuggling of migrants and illicit trafficking in firearms.
On the first day of the week-long Conference, Italy has promoted an original and innovative initiative. In cooperation with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the Italian Permanent Mission to the International Organizations has brought to Vienna a theatre play on civic responses to organized crime. The event has featured a professional theatre company performing true stories of community responses to organized crime and of Italian citizens who courageously challenged this phenomenon, sometimes paying with their own lives.
The theatre play is part of a wider educational project which has been going on since 2012, involving theatres, juvenile penitentiaries, schools, universities and civil society, including associations committed to fighting against organized crime and those that work to reuse lands seized from criminal organizations.
The show held in Vienna has been attended by a large audience composed of United Nations officials, governmental representatives from all over the world and high school students. In particular, the performance staged the stories of Giovanni Falcone, Lea Garofalo, as well as those of Addiopizzo and Gruppo Cooperativa GOEL. The event also featured excerpts from the 2017 documentary film “10 STORIE PROPRIO COSI’”, which traces the development of this project and narrates many true stories gathered along the years.
The event was introduced by the Italian Minister of Justice, Alfonso Bonafede, the Director for Operations of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Miwa Kato, and the creator of the project, Giulia Minoli.
The initiative also benefitted from the emotional contribution of Maria Falcone, President of Fondazione Falcone, Federico Cafiero De Raho, National Anti-Mafia and Antiterrerrorism Prosecutor, and Nando Dalla Chiesa, Professor of Sociology of Organized Crime at the University of Milan.
