With political disaffection and social unrest increasing around the world, the Policy Dialogue ‘Democracy and Human Rights in Decline? A Call to Action’ will identify action-orientated proposals to foster democracy in this challenging time. Plenary sessions will be broadcasted through the Club de Madrid website. Click here to see the program and preliminary list of participants
The Policy Dialogue, hosted by the European University Institute, will be a unique political, academic and civil society leaders gathering aimed at producing an analysis of the trends that have impacted democracy in the last 15 years; the signals of decline apparent across the world; and of how to reverse them. The Policy Dialogue will mark the beginning of a process aimed at producing new “democratic action agendas” for various regions of the world and thus improve the quality of the Next Generation’s Democracy around the globe.
Forty Club de Madrid Members (all of them democratically elected former Presidents and Prime Ministers) will provide the political insight. With kick-off contributions from the Club’s President, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, (Latvia) and the RKF Center’s President, Kerry Kennedy, the confirmed lineup will include, among many others, leaders from Europe such as Romano Prodi (Italy); Kjell Magne Bondevik (Norway); Tarja Halonen (Finland); Felipe González (Spain); Ruud Lubbers (Netherlands); and Boris Tadic (Serbia). African representatives include Abdul-Kareem Al Eryani (Yemen); Sadiq Al Mahdi (Sudan) Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria); and Cassam Uteem (Mauritius). From the Americas: Kim Campbell (Canada); Felipe Calderón (Mexico); Ricardo Lagos (Chile) and Andrés Pastrana (Colombia); and from Asia, Chandrika Kumaratunga (Sri Lanka) and Roza Otunbayeva (Kyrgyzstan).
International experts and practitioners, such as Larry Diamond from Stanford University; Roelf Meyer (former South African Minister under De Klerk and Mandela’s governments and key facilitator of South-African transition to democracy); Beatriz Merino (former Prime Minister of Peru) or Ismail Serageldin, co-chair of the Nizami Ganjavi International Center and Director of the Library of Alexandria; entrepreneurs and philanthropists like Mo Ibrahim and Steve Killelea or the Slifka Foundation; multi-government and multilateral institutions, (UN, OECD, SEGIB, Community of Democracies); human rights organizations (Human Rights Watch); civil society (OXFAM, Partnership for Change); academia (Berstelman Stiftung, IDEA, FLACSO, Carnegie Endowment); and the private sector (Microsoft) will all be well represented in the conference.
Structure
The Policy Dialogue will be organized in plenary and break-out sessions. During the first day, working groups will review regional dynamics and main threats to democracy in different regions and propose possible responses. On the second day, participants will share the results of initial analyses, identify commonalities and differences among regions, and define the initial elements of NGD global and regional agenda.
If you are interested in covering the 2014 Policy Dialogue or wish to request one to one interviews please visit https://clubmadrid.org/en/programa/policy_dialogue_2014 and fill in the accreditation form in the Press Room Section.
Interactive coverage
The plenary sessions will be webcasted through the Club de Madrid web page
All sessions will be live twitted by @CLUBdeMADRID, @RFKCenter, @RFKEurope and @EuropeanUni
Policy Dialogue Hashtag: #NGD
Club de Madrid, Media Contacts:
Luis Pérez: +34 607 694 354 // + 34 91 154 82 38 Press Officer lperez@clubmadrid.org
Susana Mañueco: + 34 626 20 93 30 // + 34 154 82 36 Press Coordinator smanueco@clubmadrid.org
RFKC Media Contacts:
Valeria D’Agostino: + 39 055 5389250 // + 39 349 2210113 European Press Officer europepress@rfkcenter.org