Olivier Dupuis

Olivier Dupuis is a Belgian-born politician, and former Secretary of the Transnational Radical Party.

He was born in 1958 in Ath (Belgium). He graduated in Political and Social Science at the University of Louvain. He first joined the Radical Party in 1981, and took an active part in the campaign against famine, undertaking nonviolent actions which led to his arrest and detention on numerous occasions in Brussels. In 1982 he went on a hunger strike lasting five weeks in order to obtain the effective implementation of the so-called "Survival Law", which had been passed by majority vote by the Belgian parliament. In the same year, he was arrested in Prague (Czechoslovakia) for demonstrating and handing out pamphlets with other Radical activists in support of freedom and democracy. After being arrested with two other Radical activists in Dubrovnik (Yugoslavia), he was kept in prison for three days before being expelled from the country and banned from returning for three years.

Declaring that neither military defense nor the civilian alternative are capable of facing the real threats to peace and security represented by the lack of democracy in Eastern Europe and the non-respect of the right to life in the South of the world, he was arrested in October 1985 and charged with desertion. Sentenced to two years in prison, he was released in August 1986 after spending eleven months in the prisons of Saint-Gilles and Leuven.

From 1988 he lived in Budapest, where he helped to organise the TRP Congress in April 1989. From 1989 to 1993 he coordinated the activities of the Radical Party in the countries of Central Europe. In December 1991, as the European Community obstinately refused to recognise the republics of the former Yugoslavia, he went with Marco Pannella and other Radicals to the trenches of besieged city of Osijek, and wore the Croatian uniform.