Toolkit Launch at Council of Europe
Strasbourg, 29 June 2012
The Launch Event took place at noon on 27 June in the INGO Conference Plenary. It was attended by some representatives of the Diplomatic Corps at the Council of Europe, by representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly, as well as the recently appointed CoE Director General for Democracy, Ms Snezana Markovic, who had come to speak to the plenary earlier that morning and returned to the Launch an hour later.
At one point of the presentation the need for visibility was explained along with the need for practical dialogue implementations. The word dialogue had 192 Million hits on the internet, the word toolkit obtained over 94 Million, dialoguetoolkit (in one word) got 21’450 hits and among those our website was on place 5. There, the audience spontaneously broke into strong applause. For this the tribute is due to our technology advisor Ronak Sutaria, who did a great job in setting up this dedicated site in time for the Launch.
Jean-Marie Heydt, the INGO Conference President was happy with the presentation. The only regret is that only the coordinator represented the Toolkit Team. The whole team should have been there in order to receive the words of appreciation directly.
Briefly, to recall the purpose of the whole exercise: It is because of the accumulation of unresolved issues in matters of diversity and migration over the last several years have led to an intolerable level of Human Rights infringements in European countries. In response to this the INGO Conference has elaborated this practical guide to conduct dialogues where they are most needed.
In the afternoon of the same day the coordinator was asked to go and meet a Parliamentary Assembly Committee delegation together with two INGO colleagues. That Committee is writing a report on the role of NGO’s in countering extremisms. The meeting lasted for over one hour.
For more, see the INGO Conference website, http://www.coe.int/T/NGO/default_en.asp