Ekvilib

Ekvilib's meeting with Members of European Parliament and European Commission representatives

Only a few months after starting the 5-year mandate, representatives of Ekvilib Institute met with four Slovenian representatives of the European Parliament in context of Concord’s “day of civil society”.

The purpose of the meeting with MEPs  Ivo Vajgl (Development Committee), Zoran Thaler, Alojz Peterle and Jelko Kacin (Committee on Foreign Affairs) was to present the work of Ekvilib Institute and of our recommendations, especially in the field of monitoring official development assistance and integration of human rights into development and foreign policy.

We presented MEPs with Concord’s report "Spotlight on the coherence for development" and thus stressed the importance and the need to increase and improve the efficiency of ODA on both European and Slovenian level. We especially stressed the importance of human rights in European foreign and development policy. By visiting MEPs we also tried to establish good working relations with our European representatives for the coming years of their mandate.

In addition to meetings with MEPs, we also met with representatives of the European Commission (DG Relex and DG Development) in the context of project GREAT (Global Rights: Europeans Acting Together!). We talked about the role of NGOs in new EU member states and their role as development actors as well as the role of human rights in the European development policy.

On the third day in Brussels the representatives of the Ekvilib Institute also attended the General Assembly of the European Confederation of development and humanitarian organizations Concord, where focus was on a new Concord report "In the spotlight: Coherence for development".