CCD Chairs U.S. Community of Democracies Committee
For Immediate Release: April 12, 2002
Contact: Robert R. LaGamma, 202.789.9771

WASHINGTON - - The Council for Community of Democracies (CCD) is the chair of the U.S. committee responsible for organizing U.S. participation in the non-governmental forum that will meet concurrently with the second Community of Democracies conference to be held November 10-12, 2002 in Seoul, Korea.

The Seoul conference is a follow-up to the June 2000 Community of Democracies conference in Warsaw, Poland. At Warsaw 106 nations pledged themselves to work together to promote and strengthen worldwide democracy. Like its Warsaw predecessor, the Seoul conference will be accompanied by non-official gathering of civic, religious, labor, business, political and NGO leaders called the Community of Democracies Non-Governmental Forum (NGF.)

In Warsaw, the non-governmental meeting was organized by Freedom House and Poland’s Stefan Batory Foundation and brought together individuals from eighty different nations. Then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary General Kofi Annan, 1996 Nobel Laureate Jose Ramos-Horta, philanthropist George Soros, and historian Francis Fukuyama were among the speakers and panelists.

The Seoul NGF is being organized by an international consortium that includes a U.S. committee composed of the National Endowment for Democracy, The International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Center for International Private Enterprise, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, Freedom House, the Open Society Institute and the CCD. The committee members asked the CCD to assume the chairmanship.