The EuroMed Committee, which brings together High Officials and Ambassadors of the forty-three countries of the Union for the Mediterranean, approved the Anna Lindh Foundation’s new triannual programme during its last meeting in Nice.
The programme, which will commence on the 1st of January 2009, centers on regional flag-ship projects in fields impacting on mutual perceptions across the two shores of the Mediterranean, including the fields of culture, media and education, as well as new areas of work on ‘religion and spirituality’, ‘ideas and ideologies’, ‘cities and diversity’.
The new programme will also see the Foundation assuming the role of observatory of intercultural relations across the forty-three countries of the Union for the Mediterranean, publishing an annual report on the socio-cultural trends contributing to coexistence in the region. The very first report, which is scheduled for the end of 2009, will focus on the theme of ‘The impact of media in shaping mutual perceptions’.
President Andre Azoulay has commenced the meeting with an intervention highlighting the importance of this new phase of the Foundation and its political centrality inside the Union for the Mediterranean, where the cultural and human dimension are one of the major fields for the strategic definition of this partnership.
As the first common institution of the EuroMed Partnership, the Foundation is in a unique position to implement such a large-scale programme, with an intergovernmental Board of Governors and acting as a network of over two thousand civil society organizations: NGOs, associations, schools, youth groups, universities and local authorities.
In the presentation of the Programme at the Board, the Executive Director, Andreu Claret, said : “With our new programme approved and shared by all forty-three countries of the Partnership, we are ready to put the Foundation on a new course of action: more ambitious, more valuable and more visible to those interested in the construction of a common future in the Euro-Mediterranean region”.
