Download the Press release
The “Moroccan Organization for Human Rights” (OMDH) and “No Peace Without Justice” (NPWJ), in partnership with the governments of Morocco and Italy, are convening a Workshop on democracy and local governance in the BMENA Region, to be held in Rabat, Morocco, on 5-6 October 2009.
The meeting aims at promoting productive dialogue on a peer-to-peer basis between civil society and governments of the broader Middle East and North Africa (bMENA), G8 and other democratic partners, on issues relating to the development of local authorities in the countries of the Region. The Rabat 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 status and issues of local administrations, and de-concentrated branches and units of central governments. The workshop will also aim to analyze and discuss the capacity of local governments to run their affairs and explore the relationship between local administrations and the local constituencies.
The Rabat 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 and prominent democracy activists from Morocco and other countries of the Region. 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 Marrakesh, 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.
