At 20 years old, Pannella became a national representative at the university level for the
Italian Liberal Party (PLI), member of the student association
Unione Goliardica Italiana (UGI) and at 23 he was President of the
Unione Nazionale degli Studenti, (National Union of Students). At 24 he promoted the foundation of the Partito Radicale (hereinafter the "
Radical Party"). From 1960 to 1963, he was in Paris as a correspondent of the Italian newspaper
Il Giorno. During his long political career, Pannella co-founded a series of organizations such as the Italian league for divorce, the League for objection of conscience, the League for the abrogation of the Agreement between the Catholic Church and the Italian State (Concordat), the Centre of legal initiative "
Piero Calamandrei", as well as the Italian Association for Demographic Education (AIED). He has been at the forefront of the promotion of important reforms regarding narcotics and faced incarceration on various occasions for his civil disobediences. He played a prominent role in the movement that led to the legalization of abortion in Italy in 1978. Engaged in the defence of
civil rights in Eastern European countries, in 1968 he was arrested in
Sofia for having distributed leaflets against the Communist regime. He was one of the first promoters and founders of the
Green and ecologist political movements in Europe. Over the years, he was engaged in Italy in the defence of civil rights as well as against the public financing of political parties and against corruption of Italian politics. Beginning in the 1970s, Pannella promoted a series of
referendums on themes ranging from social to political issues, in particular on those relating to the legality of the State, the rule of law and to the administration of justice. A hunger strike in April 2014 to protest Italian prison conditions resulted in Pannella having to have surgery. A disciple of
Altiero Spinelli and
Ernesto Rossi, Pannella was one of the first European Federalists and fought, through nonviolent means, for the creation of the
European Union. He was elected Secretary of the Radical Party in November 1981 and remained in office until November 1983. At the RP Congress in Budapest in 1989, he launched the creation of the
Transnational Radical Party of which he became president of the Federal Council on that occasion. In 2003, he created together with other prominent European personalities the
Medbridge Strategy Center, whose goal is to promote dialogue and mutual understanding between Europe and the
Middle-East. . He was honorary President of the Party of the Rom (ROI) in the Czech Republic and he was also honorary member of the Socialist Slovene Youth. The
Jewish National Fund (Hebrew: קרן קימת לישראל, Keren Kayemet LeYisrael) dedicated him a reforestation area in the
Negev Desert in
Israel. In October 2011, he became a member of the French Federalist Party in order to take part in the founding convention of the European Federalist Party which took place on 5/6 November 2011. Thus he became a founding member of the
European Federalist Party. ==Personal life==