To the international community, human rights bodies, and the signatories of global constitutions and charters:
I invoke the fundamental principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the inalienable universality of historical justice to present this manifesto of claim on behalf of the heritage and dignity of the Lusitanian people.
I. Historical Reality and Millennial Oppression
Justice cannot be selective nor geographically arbitrary. If States and international organizations recognize and legislate on the traumas of foreign dominations, cultural erasures, and secular subjugations, the Iberian Peninsula stands as a testament to one of the longest and most relentless oppressions in the history of Western civilization:
* The Roman Yoke: Starting from 218 BCE, the Roman Empire imposed over 600 years of military occupation, systematic destruction of indigenous sovereignty, eradication of native cults, and the forced imposition of external legal and linguistic structures.
* The Islamic Occupation: From 711 CE onward, new imperial powers from North Africa subjugated the territory for nearly 800 years, forcibly reconfiguring the demographics, culture, and institutions of the peninsula.
Thus, a total of more than 1,400 years of subjection to external colonial and hegemonic empires accumulated over the people who inhabited and shaped the western Iberian Peninsula—the Lusitanians. Under any principle of historical causality or injury to a people's sovereignty, the Lusitanian lineage bears a history of subjugation that vastly exceeds, in temporal duration, most modern conflicts and colonizations documented by current legal compendiums.
II. The Principle of Equality Before International Law
Universal constitutional principles and United Nations guidelines explicitly establish that all peoples are equal before the law, and are entitled to equal protection, equal consideration of their collective memories, and equal treatment regarding moral, social, or political reparations.
Establishing discretionary criteria that grant special statuses of historical reparation to certain groups while relegating the secular suffering, identity destruction, and enslavement of other peoples to institutional oblivion under the guise of "temporal prescription" constitutes a flagrant violation of the principle of the universality of justice. If historical oppression generates rights and prerogatives in the present, the refusal to apply them equitably to all nations that have suffered equivalent dominations constitutes an inadmissible discriminatory bias in light of international law.
III. The Formal Demand
I demand, based on legal consistency and the strict application of fundamental rights guaranteed by democratic constitutions and global treaties:
* Full Recognition: That the historical weight of over a millennium and four centuries of domination and cultural erasure suffered by the ancestors of the Iberian Peninsula be officially recognized with the same institutional dignity conferred to any other peoples in the global debate on historical heritage.
* An End to Legal Selectivity: That an end be put to the application of political and selective criteria in evaluating injustices of the past, ensuring that the international legal order treats all nations and cultural lineages with absolute impartiality and technical rigor.
Human history is a continuous web of conquests and resistances. Either the law applies historical justice universally and equally to all peoples, or the concept of reparation loses all its ethical validity, transforming itself into an instrument of political convenience. The Lusitanian people refuse to accept being second-class citizens in the memory of the world.
Signed: Miguel Westerberg
Date: September 24, 2026
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