Year XXXIX, Number 1, July 2026

Luigi Ferrajoli

President of Costituente Terra. Professor emeritus of philosophy of law at the University of Roma Tre.

The meeting of progressive leaders from all over the world, promoted these days in Barcelona by President Pedro Sánchez to agree on a common response to the authoritarian regression of our democracies and to violations of international law, is in itself a first step toward building an alternative to the far right. It is clear that this alternative cannot ignore the two terrible scourges that are the effects of that regression: the illegal wars of aggression launched by Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump, which risk degenerating into a nuclear conflict, and the lack of measures aimed at addressing global warming, which, if not halted, will render the Earth uninhabitable.

It is not enough, in the face of these scourges, to lament the collapse of the international order and the blindness of our right-wing governments, united by their denial of the ecological issue – "the greatest hoax in history," as Donald Trump has called it. Nor is it sufficient to defend the existing international law and its current institutions, whose failure has made their total impotence and inadequacy evident. A rational and realistic response to this failure, on the part of the democratic forces gathered in Barcelona, should consist in a project for the constitutional re-founding of the United Nations, one that imposes legal limits and constraints, in the interest of all, on the current savage powers of nuclear states and global markets. This constitutionalization of the UN can occur only through the introduction of a complex system of guarantees, without which the universal principles proclaimed in so many international charters – peace, environmental protection, and equality in human rights – are merely words, unfulfilled promises.

We are living through the most dramatic period in history. At a time when the scourge of nuclear danger and that of ecological catastrophe would require an increase in the governing capacity of politics and in the safeguarding role of law, the triumph of the right in much of the West has produced the simultaneous development of two forms of absolutism: political absolutism, due to the autocratic regression of many democracies and the absence of limits on governmental powers; and economic absolutism, due to the concentration of wealth and the absence of limits on market powers. Humanity has fallen into the hands of small groups of autocrats and multibillionaires who accept no limits to their power. The president of the greatest military power, Donald Trump, has declared that he recognizes no limits other than those he sets himself.

Hence, in a world dominated by the law of the strongest, by the logic of the enemy, and by contempt for the law, the danger of a nuclear holocaust. Hence the worsening ecological catastrophe looming over our planet, given that each year more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere than in the previous one. If there is no awakening of reason, humanity is destined to become extinct, due to global warming, amid atrocious suffering. Our grandchildren will not be able to forgive us, nor even understand the irresponsibility and stupidity of our generations, which will have left them a planet transformed into a hell.

These are the problems that the democratic forces gathered in Barcelona should address. What is needed is a historic turning point, which only such forces can promote: the transformation of the UN Charter into a Constitution of the Earth, whose supremacy over every other source, national or international, is guaranteed by a Global Constitutional Court. There are three universal values – because they are in the interest of all – that only a Constitution of the Earth is capable of guaranteeing: first, peace, through the constitutional prohibition, as crimes against humanity, of the production and trade of all weapons, not only nuclear weapons but also ordinary firearms; second, the natural environment, through the ban on the use of fossil fuels and the protection of vital natural goods – drinking water, major forests, major glaciers – as assets of a planetary public domain removed from commodification and depletion; third, equality, through the creation of global institutions guaranteeing the rights to health, education, and subsistence for all human beings.

This is not a utopia. It is the concrete implementation of principles already enshrined in the UN Charter and in the many human rights charters, but which have remained mere words on paper because they lack guarantees. It is the implementation of these principles that constitutes the leap in civilization that the progressive leaders of 40 countries, gathered for the first time in Barcelona, should propose and demand. In the interest of all – poor and rich, weak and powerful: the survival of humanity on the only planet we have is at stake.

(*) We open here a dialogue on the perspective of a Constitution for the Earth, as a constitutional reform of the United Nations system, taking occasion from the article of the jurist and philosopher Luigi Ferrajoli, published in Spanish for El País, on the occasion of the "Global Progressive Mobilization" in Barcelona, where on April 17 and 18, 2026 gathered, over five thousands activist and leaders from over 40 countries from all over the world, with the aim to counter the nationalistic forces through a renewed international coordination of progressive democratic organizations, under invitation of Pedro Sanchez, Spain's Prime Minister and President of the Socialist International Pedro Sanchez, of whom we publish the speech there delivered, alongside the one by Ignacio Lula da Silva, President of Brazil. This event has to be regarded with much attention from the federalist forces: the political struggle is apparently finally starting to reach the scale of the World - beyond the national state representations - towards the times of the needed planetary politics - for the common good of humanity.