Centre Nord-Sud

I am very grateful to the Executive Director for the opportunity to introduce myself, and to share some early thoughts on the role of and contribution made by the North South Centre.

My engagement with the Centre has seen three phases.

Firstly, in my previous role, as Permanent Representative of a member State not a member of the Enlarged Partial Agreement, I was an interested spectator. As the role of the Centre was debated by all member States, I recognised the value to its members but more widely to the Council of Europe, and supported efforts to ensure its future role supporting key areas of the wider Organisation’s work, within and outside of the “neighbourhood policy”.

Secondly, responsible for the Organisation’s education and youth programmes, I became more aware of the detail and results of the Centre’s activities. With the obvious connections between the Centre’s activities and those of the Education and Youth programmes, I was keen to explore how we could operate more, ensuring that we derived maximum impact – and positive outcomes – from our mutually-reinforcing engagement with young people in Europe and beyond, through citizenship education and other capacity-building activities.

I was therefore very pleased to receive the Centre into my Directorate as part of a wider re-organisation of the Directorate General effective from 1 September – starting the third phase of my engagement – and have already discussed with the Executive Director how we can improve further the existing co-operation with the Education and Youth programmes and more widely, give greater visibility to the Centre’s work, and secure funding for some of its innovative activities.

There is no doubt that we live in a Europe of huge opportunity, but also of populism, extremism, intolerance and distrust. In some member States, human rights and minority protections are under threat and, time and again, we see hate speech increase in parallel. So we have to return to the philosophy underpinning the European Convention on Human Rights: that if we are to guarantee peace and stability, citizens, communities and countries must interact and co-operate on the basis of shared values, shared standards and common ground.

We need our young people to promote and demonstrate tolerance, show that they are at ease with our increasingly diverse societies, challenge bias and prejudice, and transmit the values which help bind our societies such as pluralism and respect for others.

The work of the Centre is key to all of this, able to play a role in these fields and more widely, demonstrating the value of listening to citizens’ concerns so that, through dialogue and capacity-building, their needs, and those of their societies, can be tackled. The Centre has a strong track record of effective approaches helping to achieve these goals.

I look forward to supporting the Centre’s continuing efforts over the years to come.

Ambassador Matthew Johnson,

Director of Democratic Citizenship and Participation