The “Arab Democracy Foundation” (ADF) and “No Peace Without Justice” (NPWJ), in partnership with the governments of Morocco and Italy, are convening a Workshop on Human Security and Human Development in the broader Middle East and North Africa (bMENA) Region, to be held in Doha, Qatar, on 12-13 October 2009.
The meeting aims at promoting productive dialogue on a peer-to-peer basis between civil society and governments of the bMENA Region, G8 and other democratic partners, on issues relating to Human Development and Human Security in countries of the region. The Doha Workshop is intended to provide a setting for concrete exchanges between high-level governmental and non-governmental actors from the Region aiming at the development of proposals and goals that can be jointly agreed upon by them. The workshop will particularly focus on addressing the relationship between political reform and social development, and the broader challenges that fit within the human security issues, with a particular reference to the 2009 Arab Human Development report issued by UNDP. The meeting aims at facilitating a new approach to the question of Human Development, by linking both concepts of freedom from fear and freedom from want in a way that ties the political to the social issues.
The Doha Workshop builds upon the guiding principles for stronger dialogue and cooperation between Governments and civil society contained in the “Partnership document”, which has been acknowledged by the fifth Forum of the Future held in Abu Dhabi in October 2008.
Participants will include high-level governmental representatives, prominent democracy activists with an expertise in various areas of human security from several counties of the Region,as well as representatives from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
The meeting is part of a series of initiatives organised in preparation for the 2009 Forum for the Future, under the Italian and Moroccan co-presidency, in coordination with the Democracy Assistance Dialogue (DAD) partnership. The results of the Workshop will be presented to the Ministerial Meeting of the Forum for the Future 2009 in Marrakech, Morocco, on 2-3 November 2009, to provide a set of constructive proposals and recommendations that could fruitfully feed the discussion between governments and civil society.
For further information, please contact: Gianluca Eramo, email: geramo@npwj.org., phone: +32 494 533 925
