September 2009

Please forward to other young liberals (or liberals young at heart)

The 32nd General Assembly of the International Federation of Liberal Youth will be held in The Hague, Netherlands from the 12th to the 14th of November 2009 hosted with IFLRY Full Members JD and JOVD. The General Assembly will be electing a new Bureau and dealing with a major revision of the IFLRY Manifesto. Find the invitation, technical information and the nomination form in the Document Center

IFLRY is also offering a Seminar after the General Assembly titled "Human Trafficking: I am not for sale" in Amsterdam from November the 16st to the 21st. A separate invitation with more details can be accessed in our Document Center .

If you are interested in attending, please contact your Member Organisation for information regarding nominations. Nomination forms must be sponsored by the International Officer or President of a Member Organisation. Please submit the nomination form for these events to events@iflry.org by appropriate deadlines.

Looking forward to meeting you in the Netherlands!

Picture: © Copyright 2009 Mike Kramer, FreeLargePhotos.com

On the 24th and 25th of August, several leaders from African liberal youth organizations gathered in Johannesburg, South Africa, in order to discuss the future of the dormant Organization of African Liberal Youth. The meeting was hosted by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in coordination with outgoing OALY President Sidi Toure. IFLRY Secretary General Bart Woord took part in order to support with the revision process of the strategy and structure of OALY. The participants agreed on relaunching OALY with a new mission and organizational structure, which shall be submitted for approval to the next OALY Congress planned for early 2010.

IFLRY Secretary General Bart Woord visited Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe on the 27th and 28th of August. He met with young representatives from the Movement for Democratic Change (Mutambara faction) at the office of MDC-M Secretary General Welshman Ncube. The meeting focused on the difficulties faced by MDC-M in the harsh political context of Zimbabwe and the various ways that IFLRY can be of support to their work. The representatives affirmed their commitment to being part of the liberal family, as previously evidenced by MDC-M's cooperation with Liberal International and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom.

Bart also met with representatives from Dutch development NGO HIVOS and the Zimbabwean Student Association ZINASU.

If you or your organization is interested in supporting young liberals in Zimbabwe, please contact Bart via bart@iflry.org .

IFLRY is developing a Tool Kit for democracy work, and this is your chance to contribute to it! The Tool Kit will be a collection of ideas and best practices from our member organizations, that all our members and liberals from all around the globe can use as a source of inspiration!

Exchanging ideas is an important part of strengthening the IFLRY network, and the Tool Kit will play an important part in this process of sharing. A team of editors that was created at the IFLRY seminar in Georgia in June is now working on the first edition of the Tool Kit, but the idea is that the kit will be a dynamic and constantly evolving publication. Thus as best practices and ideas are added, new versions will be published.

We now need you to help us. Does your organization hold a superb event? Have you made a campaign that worked out really well? Does your organization have an extraordinary feature on your homepage? We collect all kinds of best practices – just fill in the template that you find here and email it to intern@iflry.org no later than 18.9. Instructions and examples to the template you find here

Right after the Executive Committee Meeting in Beirut, IFLRY Vice President Frederik Ferié continued to the Southern Caucasus, where he organized and conducted several seminars together with a group of lecturers from IFLRY Full Member Junge Liberale Germany (JuLis) for the Friedrich-Naumann-Foundation for Liberty (FNF). The group started with a seminar in Azerbaijan and then later moved on to Georgia and eventually Armenia.

All seminars discussed the topic "Civil and Minority Rights in the Liberal Society", and as the civil rights in all three countries are continuously significantly challenged, the issue was debated intensively in each of the events. FNF had invited the respective Member Organizations of IFLRY to send participants to the seminars so that the meetings also provided excellent opportunities to connect with members that had not been able to travel to Beirut. Both JuLis and FNF were highly satisfied with the outcomes of the events and have already expressed their interest in repeating the cooperation project in the next year.

The IFLRY Bureau is calling upon all its member organizations to consider hosting the mid-year Executive Committee in 2010. The event is organized by one or more host organizations in close cooperation with the IFLRY Bureau and Secretariat. Preference is accorded to those organizations that are able to raise domestic funds for the event. There are no geographic requirements for the venue.

As previous hosts have experienced, having a statutory event in your country provides a great boost for your domestic and international visibility and political recognition. It is also a great way to mobilize your members to become active internationally.

If your organization is interested in hosting this event and you would like to receive more information, please contact IFLRY Secretary General Bart Woord (bart@iflry.org).

Write an essay about democracy and win a ticket to the World Movement for Democracy’s Sixth Assembly in Jakarta, Indonesia, in April 2010

The World Youth Movement for Democracy is launching Global Essay Contest. There will be fifteen winners (3 in each region: Asia, Central/Eastern Europe & Eurasia, Middle East & North Africa, Latin America & Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa). Find more information here. The deadline for essay submissions is September 15.

In his letter on the 13th of August, Oswaldo José Payá, denounces that some country members of the Organization of American States and even the United Nations don’t do anything against the degrading treatment that undergoes political prisoners in Cuba because they prefer to answer with accomplice silence.

This silence is what has given wings to the Cuban Regime to not fulfill declaration of Human Rights and it is what has allowed the rise of a systematic humiliation of those people who have been put in jail for expressing their opinion against the totalitarianism of the Cuban State.

For this reason the Varela Project reinforces their media action campaign with the aim that for first time, since 1948, the Cuban population can express their political will with truly democratic guarantees.

Find more info here .

From the 25th until 30th of July around 150 young liberals gathered at Hove Leir in Arendal, Norway, for the joint LYMEC/NUV summercamp. The summercamp this year was hosted by Norges Unge Venstre (NUV) and gathered about 40 international participants. Read more here

Last Thursday, August 6, the members of El Ghad Liberal Youth Union (GLYU) took part in a political campaign of El Ghad Liberal Party in the streets of the Egyptian city Damnhour in the Nile Delta.

The member of GLYU urged the people in the streets of the city to consolidate their political rights. The young people of GLYU held meetings with the people aiming to persuade them to participate in the next presidential election 2011 in favor of the Liberal and young candidate Mr Ayman Nour.

Mr Nour himself took part in this campaign and expressed his support to the youth action to encourage the Egyptian people to take more action in the political participation. It is well known that the political participation in Egypt doesn’t exceed 22% of the registered voters.

IFLRY, the International Federation of Liberal Youth, is an international political umbrella organisation promoting cooperation among youth and student organisations to spread liberal values.
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