CEE Citizens Network's blog

there was an excellent presentation made this past week at the Committee on Sustainable Territorial Development by Ulrich Bohner who is the Secretary General of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities at the CoE.

here is one quote:
If democracy is the power of people, then people’s participation in power-sharing and decision-making is its essential requirement. It has become especially clear when, looking for reasons for people’s disenchantment with politics and politicians – which is particularly reflected in falling voter turnouts during elections – the international community had to acknowledge a growing feeling among our citizens that they are unable to influence political decisions, that they exist separately from political life, and that they are powerless to change anything. In other words, that they don’t matter.

for the whole speech click on:

https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?id=1510961&Site=Congress&BackColorInternet=e0cee1&BackColorIntranet=e0cee1&BackColorLogged=FFC679

Chuck

At the meeting of the Council of Europe Forum for the Future of Democracy held in Sweden in June last year, participants called on the INGO Conference of the Council of Europe to prepare a Code of Good Practice for Civil Participation which should cover questions such as mechanisms for NGO participation in decision-making processes and other forms of citizens’ involvement. The principal objective of this instrument is to contribute to an enabling environment for NGOs in Council of Europe Member States and Belarus by defining at European level, a set of general principles and guidelines for the civil participation in decision-making processes to be implemented at local and national level.

After the ifrst revision of the code, which has been taking place recently in Sweden, we have set up a wiki site for open contributing/commenting to the code.

We encourage all our readers to investigate and participate in the process of making this code better and better.

The Wiki of the Draft Code (which is really simle to use, in 3 minutes, you will get used to all the possibilities) can be found here: http://codeforcivicparticipation.wiki.zoho.com/Introduction.html

by Madarász Csaba

As CEECN is quite a new member of the Conferenc of INGOS from the Council of Europe, I was asked on behalf of the CEECN to give some feedback related to the website of the Council – with Nigel Warner and Silvia Geise.

I was feeling really good, because the whole COE website park is an unbalanced mess -except some fresh parts, and giving opinion from the NGO side – and hiding my personal expertise in e-government and internet related issues – was a challenge.

Of course, the COE might appear as a fairly good bunch of websites, but I do think, that the revision has just come in time.

Unfortunately, there is no response, how it will be handled, and the consultation process is not an open process (I am convinced it would be better)
Comments Madarasz Coeweb080626v1