CALD Executive Director attends Community of Democracies Asia Regional Workshop

(October 6, 2004/ Taipei, Taiwan) John Joseph S. Coronel, Executive Director of the Council of Asian Liberals & Democrats (CALD), attended the just concluded two-day Asia Regional Workshop of the Community of Democracies (CD) at the headquarters of the Taiwan Democracy Foundation (TFD).

Sponsored by TFD and the Chile-based CD  Executive Secretariat Santiago 2005 Non-Government Forum for the Community of Democracies, the workshop focused on major issues concerning democratization in Asia, as well as the further strengthening of democracy networks within the region.  The meeting was in preparation for the Final Meeting of the Nongovernmental Process of the Community of Democracies in Santiago, Chile within the first half of 2005. Mr. Coronel also attended the preparatory meeting of the CD Nongovernmental Process in Lisbon, Portugal last January.

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. The ten convening governments (Chile, the Czech Republic, India, Mali, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, South Korea, and the United States of America) hold bi-annual inter-governmental meetings at the ministerial level. Held in parallel to the Ministerial Conference is a Non-Governmental Forum attended by democracy advocates and activists and other delegates from civil society. The Forum, discussing issues in common with the ministerial conference, formulates recommendations to advance the issues on the latter’s agenda.

The first Ministerial meeting was held in Warsaw in 2000, and the second meeting was held in 2002 inSeoul, South Korea, at which the participating governments agreed on a Plan of Action. The next NGO process is planned for Jan 2005 in Santiago, Chile, which aims at developing a sustainable process for meetings of social and political actors around the world, raising global awareness on the importance of developing effective and comprehensive democracy promotion instruments, and to push governments to meet their commitments and take concrete action along the lines of civil society recommendations.

To enable the Forum to develop to its full potential, it was envisaged that each region would hold preparatory workshops. The workshops endeavored to build a regional consensus on the direction of the CD process, in order that each region’s voice shall be heard effectively at the Forum level.

Dr. Michael Kau, Deputy Foreign Minister of Taiwan and TFD President opened the regional workshop. The topics covered were: fighting corruption to promote democracy in Asia; governance systems and accountability in Asia; civil society’s role in monitoring public affairs at the Asian regional level; and, developing democracy in closed societies.

Among the participants were officials of CALD member parties, observer parties and partners including Dr. Chee Soon Juan, Secretary General of the Singapore Democratic Party; Japanese legislator Kazuo Inoue of the Democrat Party; Dr. Ronald Meinardus of Friedrich Naumann Foundation-Manila; and, Paul Rowland of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs-Jakarta.

Mr. Coronel also attended the planning meeting of the World Forum for the Democratization of Asia.