Korea To Host Second Community of Democracies Conference
For Immediate Release: April 12, 2002
Contact: Robert R. LaGamma, 202.789.9771

WASHINGTON - - Foreign Ministers from more than one hundred democratic nations, as well as non-governmental democracy experts and advocates, will gather in Seoul, Korea, November 10-12 of this year to assess the state of worldwide democracy.

At the first community of democracies conference, held in June 2000 in Warsaw, 106 nations committed themselves to work together to strengthen the institutions and processes of democracy, to uphold the values of compromise and tolerance and to promote people-to-people linkages and education for democracy.

The Seoul conference, like its Warsaw predecessor, will be accompanied by a concurrent meeting of civic, religious, labor, business, political and NGO leaders which has been formally titled the Community of Democracies Non-Governmental Forum (NGF.)  The formal foreign minister’s meeting is limited to practicing democracies, but the NGF will include people seeking the establishment or reestablishment of democracy in their respective nations.

The official ministerial conference is being organized by a group of ten convening nations working through their Washington embassies and the U.S. Department of State.  The members of the convening group are Chile, the Czech Republic, India, Korea, Mali, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, South Africa and the United States.  The NGF is the responsibility of an international consortium of pro-democracy organizations from those same nations.

U.S. participation in the NGF is managed by a U.S. coordinating committee, chaired by the Council for a Community of Democracies (CCD) and 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.

- -