The Bureau of the Council of Europe’s North-South Centre, meeting by videoconference on 29 April 2020, endorsed the Centre’s "One Humanity, Our Humanity" solidarity campaign and discussed measures and strategies to be adopted in the current crisis caused by COVID-19.
Representing the Congress at the meeting, Secretary General Andreas Kiefer welcomed these steps, stressing that integrating the implications and challenges of the COVID-19 crisis into the Centre's three priorities for action – education for global citizenship, youth co-operation and women empowerment – was an appropriate and timely initiative which would contribute to strengthening the synergies between the Centre’s members and stakeholders. "The Congress has developed an online platform to collect good initiatives and needs from local and regional authorities on both sides of the Mediterranean to enable exchange between them and to pass those experiences on to higher levels of government in a bottom-up perspective," he added. This platform will also allow lessons to be learned from the management of and the responses to the current crisis, and will feed into both the work of the Congress and the campaign launched by the North-South Centre.
The Secretary General also pointed out that the themes of the two projects to be launched by the Centre in 2020 – on global youth and the promotion of diversity and equality – were at the heart of the Congress’ work, both within its statutory activities and in the framework of its South-Med Partnership and its co-operation activities in Morocco and Tunisia.
The Congress will also, as in the past years, submit proposals of candidates for the Council of Europe’s prestigious North-South Prize, awarded annually by the North-South Centre to two candidates who have distinguished themselves by their exceptional commitment to promoting solidarity between the North and the South of the Mediterranean in the fields of human rights protection, the defence of pluralist democracy and raising public awareness of global interdependence and solidarity issues.
The Congress is an institutional stakeholder of the North-South Centre, whose mission is to spread beyond the European continent the universal values of the Council of Europe: human rights, democracy and the rule of law.
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