CALD attends Community of Democracies Meeting in Lisbon

(January 21, 2004/Lisbon, Portugal) John Joseph Coronel, Executive Director of the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats, attended the First Coordination Meeting of the Non-Governmental process for the Community of Democracies. The two and a half day meeting, which finished today, was held at the Institute for Political Studies of the Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon.

The meeting was in preparation of the Community of Democracies conference in December, 2005 to be held in Santiago, Chile. The said meeting was attended by about forty civil society players from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, North America, Europe, Sub-saharan Africa and Russia, Balkans and New Independent States. Mr. Coronel was one of the four representatives from Asia.

The Community of Democracies began in Poland in 2000 as a coalition of democratic governments with the common goal of strengthening democratic values and institutions at the national, regional, and global levels.

This meeting was convened by the governments of Chile, the Czech Republic, India, Mali, Poland, South Korea, and the United States of America. After that, three other countries joined the process: Mexico, Portugal, and South Africa. In the Warsaw meeting, a civil society counterpart held a parallel meeting, in the first effort to include non-governmental actors in this process.

A second meeting was held in November 2002 in Seoul, South Korea, at which the participating governments agreed on a Plan of Action. At this time, the non-governmental meeting, “Global Solidarity for the Expansion and Strengthening of Democracy,” convened 256 people from 75 countries to prepare a Declaration for the strengthening of democracy.  The next meeting of the Community of Democracies will be held in Santiago, Chile, in early 2005.

An Executive Secretariat was recently created to develop and to coordinate the non-governmental process for that meeting. This Executive Secretariat is hosted in PARTICIPA, a Chilean NGO that participated in the International Committee of the non-governmental forum in Seoul 2002. Genaro Arriagada is its Chairman and Andrea Sanhueza is the Executive Secretary.

The non-govrenmentr process is aimed at (1) organizing and developing a participatory process for social and political actors; (2) advocating global awareness on the importance of democracy promotion instruments; and (3) increasing the implemntation of government commitments along the lines of civil oscity proposals.

Categorised in: News Article

This post was written by CALD