Last weekend, I had chance to attend the 55th Congress of Liberal International. It was a very interesting meeting with many important leader from all over the world.
As IFLRY' s representatives, we had a very nice host organization, our beloved member organisation Alliance Youth. They were key to the local details and were essential to our stay in Belfast. Thank you guys!!!, it was very nice to see you and to eat at Red Panda so to have "the best Chinese food" in all of Northern Ireland.
I would like to use this opportunity to congratulate the elected bureau of Liberal International who will be serving a new term and I hope to continue and improve relations between LI and IFLRY during their upcoming term.
At this Congress we had opportunity to get to know from first hand about situation in many places of the world. President of Senegal Mr. Abdoulaye Wade addressed the plenary at the welcome session, as well as Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai presidential candidate of Zimbabwe, who spoke with passion about the situation in Zimbabwe and the expectations and importants related to upcoming elections on June 27th
Other interesting meeting was the one between Relial (Liberal Network of Latin America) and CALD (Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats). I have opportunity to attend, at the invitation received by Relial's president Otto Guevara, and also as Colombian. During this meeting there were representatives of Thailand, Japan, Burma, Taiwan, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Perú, Paraguay and Colombia. Participants of this meetings expressed our concerns about political situation in our countries and our regions and also the meeting discussed ways to promote cooperation among there two platforms. I mentioned to participants from Asia our interest on having young representatives of all their countries in our next Executive Committee in Manila and they were willing to find ways to send them to our event.
I also had the honour to be invited to attend Lunch of International Liberal Leaders, hosted by Graham Watson MP, Leader of ALDE (Alliance of Liberal and Democrats for Europe) in the European Parliament. There were about 30-35 people from all continents. During this event, I had opportunity to talk with Mr. Watson about IFLRY's activities and also about situation in Colombia and Latin America. During his speech he mentioned his happiness about new steps done by IFLRY during last years, and our improvements as an organisation.
As part of the programme content of LI Congress, it was included a panel called "An inclusive society" in which I was asked to be moderator. The panel had as objective to debate about liberal perspectives regarding exclusion and discrimination in societies. Those panelists talked about discrimination of LGBT people around the world, but also about political exclusion that have been happening in Zimbabwe.
Besides those interesting topics, there were also funny things: my biography was printed in event book but my name was misspelled, so I suddenly became into Paola da Silva. It sounded as Brazilian and at the end even people from Latin America who knew me for long time ago, decided to introduce me to people as Paola da Silva.
Therefore, during this Congress there were many participants who came to me and to some other bureau and IFLRY representative to tell us their stories when they were members of bureau or attended an IFLRY event. Among this people it was Graham Watson, leader of ALDE and who mentioned me those times when he was IFLRY's secretary general and Roman Jakič from Slovenina who alse served as bureau member some years ago. Besides, our dearest Martin Sjögren who was a former Vicepresident of IFLRY and can not get enough of liberal politics, and of course our lovely Emilianito Kirjas who has never left the IFLRY family, just came to London to study and became LI’s Secretary General to be closer to us.
The LI Congress was a great event for IFLRY to promote that there is an active youth movement. As we were a group, we often divided ourselves between the workshops. My stories here are of the sessions that I attended, but the other delegates would have other stories to share as there were parallel sessions running daily. We gain a lot of exposer at this event, and I hope it continues.