Emma Bonino is one of the most important names in civil and humanitarian activism and Italian feminism of the last century, with her commitment in particular in campaigns for the liberalization of abortion and against nuclear power, both through referendum propaganda and with acts of civil disobedience. During her career she promoted various initiatives for the liberalization of soft drugs and on an international level she was committed to the defense of civil and political rights, including divorce, the abolition of the death penalty, the right to self-determination, legal euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Member of the Radical Party since 1975 and founder of +Europa, born as a list in 2017 and established as a party in 2019, she has been a member of parliament several times, member of the European Parliament and European commissioner, as well as twice minister, senator, vice-president of the Senate (2008-2013) and in 2015 she received the title of Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit. Always driven by the idea that human rights are not a Western luxury but a universal issue, she passed away in Rome today, 11 September 2026, at the age of 78.
Emma Bonino challenged the laws: from Bra to Montecitorio
Emma Bonino was born on 9 March 1948 in Bra, in the province of Cuneo, into a family of peasant origins from Piedmont. He studied foreign languages and literatures at Bocconi University in Milan, where he graduated with a thesis on the autobiography of Malcolm X, the African-American civil rights leader.
Her public career began with a gesture that immediately launched her onto the national political scene. In Italy in the early Seventies, abortion was illegal and clandestine: according to estimates reported by the Ministry of Health, before legalization, clandestine abortions were between 220,000 and 600,000 per year and could cause serious complications and even death.
In 1975 Bonino, who lived that experience first hand, approached the CISA (Information Center on Sterilization and Abortion, founded in 1973 together with Adele Faccio and several radical feminists), a network of clinics that performed pregnancy terminations with the so-called Karman method (a low-pressure suction technique, at the time already used in hospitals around the world) and organized trips to clinics abroad, in England, Switzerland and Yugoslavia. She does something that becomes a method for her: instead of hiding, in 1975 he denounces himself for the practice of clandestine abortionand is arrested.
In 1976, at just 28 years old, she was elected deputy with the Radical Party. When in 1977 Parliament had to decide whether to authorize the trial against her, Marco Pannella and his colleague Adele Faccio implored the Chamber to vote yes, in order to obtain media coverage: the Chamber voted no, to take the stage away from them, but it was not enough. The following year, in 1978, Italy approved the Law 194which legalizes and regulates the voluntary termination of pregnancy. It is the fruit of the work of a vast feminist movement, and it is also thanks to her courage.
The “radical method”: nonviolence, referendums and fasting
The method of Emma Bonino and her historic fighting partner, Marco Pannella, charismatic leader of the Radicals who passed away in 2016, has its roots in Gandhian nonviolence and is based on three tools: the abrogation referendum (the instrument with which citizens can cancel a law, used by the Radicals as a picklock to open issues that the parties avoided), the civil disobedience and it hunger and thirst strikefasting, practiced by both dozens of times as a form of extreme political pressure.
It is a policy made by a permanent minority, but capable of imposing an agenda, and is adopted for divorce, abortion, conscientious objection, anti-prohibitionism on drugs, justice and prisoners’ rights. The Radicals have almost always received few votes, but with their demonstrations they have forced the major parties to take a position on issues that they would have preferred to ignore. In a country long divided between Catholic and communist cultures, Bonino embodied a secular and liberal third way which in Italy has always had few representatives and difficulty getting elected.
Europe and the world: from Commissioner to Foreign Minister
If in Italy he remained a minority voice, in Europe and on the international scene Bonino established himself, sitting from 1979 to European Parliamentof which he became one of the best-known figures. Between the 1995 and 1999 And European Commissioner in the Commission led by Jacques Santer, with delegations to fisheries, consumer protection and above all to humanitarian aid. In the years of the great post-Cold War crises (from the Balkans to Rwanda, from the African Great Lakes to Afghanistan) Bonino built an international reputation by going personally to the crisis theaters, thanks also to the seven languages, including Arabic, that he was able to speak.
His best electoral result came in 1999: “Bonino List” gets an unexpected 8.5% in the European elections, with which he won seven seats. In Italy, meanwhile, she became minister for international trade and European policies in the second Prodi government (2006-2008), then vice-president of the Senate and, from 2013 to 2014, minister of foreign affairs in Enrico Letta’s government.
The battles beyond the Italian borders
Among the fights dearest to her, the one against death penalty: through the association “Hands Off Cain” Emma Bonino and the Radicals have led the international diplomatic campaign for years universal moratorium on executionsculminating in 2007 in the historic United Nations General Assembly resolution calling on states to suspend capital executions.
Bonino fought for many other causes: the “A flower for the women of Kabul” campaign against the discrimination of Afghan women under the Taliban in 1997, the international mobilization against female genital mutilationthe never-ending attention towards the Arab world, the fight against world hunger. A commitment that always came from the same core: the idea that i human rights are not a Western luxury but a universal issue, to be defended even when it is inconvenient.
In 2017 he founded +Europe (More Europe)the movement with which he tries to bring an openly pro-European and liberal list to Parliament, with which he will participate in the elections in 2018.
Because Emma Bonino left her mark
Bonino will be remembered for her coherence: she made some nonviolencedel guaranteeism (the defense of the rights of defendants and prisoners), del secularism and of theEuropeanism non-negotiable lines for fifty years, although this has not often brought consensus. Her political legacy is also measured in her ability to have brought into the Italian public debate and to have always spoken out, personally and for decades, issues that have been transformed into rights (such as individual freedom, the secular state, divorce, legal abortion) that today we almost take for granted.
