CEE CN site

Chuck Hirt and Mate Varga attended the Conference of INGO of the Council of Europe that was hold in Strasbourg on January 26 - 30, 2009.  The main thing was that they made considerable progress about plans for European Local Democracy Week and Citizens Participation Week coordination.  ELDW was launched by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities in 2007and every year would involve more and more cities and regions. It always took place in October to celebrate the date of the opening for signatures of the Charter on Local Self Government. The objectives is to raise awareness of local councillors on local democracy and to remind citizens of the European context in which they lived. 

Chuck Hirt also attented other three quarterly meetings of the Council of Europe where he was active on finalizing of the Code of good practice on civil participation in decision making process. The Code was adopted by the Conference of INGOs at its meeting on 1st October 2009. It is a very significant document that gives us a really powerful tool for use with communities and local authorities - critical issue for us is now how to implement the document.

Yu can read the final version of the Code on:

http://www.coe.int/t/ngo/Source/Code_good_practice_en.pdf 

CEE Citizens Network was represented by Kajo Zboril from Center for Community Organizing, Slovakia on the Council of Europe annual event - Forum for the Future of Democracy. This year session was hold on October 21-23, 2009 in Kyiv on the topic "Electoral systems: strengthening democracy in the 21st century".