High-Level Meeting on Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue
UfM Headquarters, Barcelona, 22-23 July, 2015
On 22-23 July 2015, at the initiative of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation and the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), a High-level Meeting on Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue will be held at the UfM headquarters in partnership with the European Union, the Anna Lindh Foundation (ALF), the UN Alliance of Civilizations (AoC) and the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Inter-religious and Inter-cultural Dialogue (KAICIID).
This meeting falls within the framework of the 20th anniversary of the Barcelona Process, the ongoing consultation regarding the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) review, and responds to the growing importance assigned to intercultural and interreligious dialogue in the Euro-Mediterranean region as powerful tools for achieving stability and peace, fighting against intolerance and extremism while upholding values of peaceful coexistence.
This meeting represents a unique occasion to map and evaluate existing tools, instruments and institutions for interreligious and intercultural dialogue; position interreligious and intercultural dialogue as a central goal within a renewed multilateral policy approach to the Mediterranean; as well as set out a roadmap ahead involving main institutions for a shared intercultural and interreligious dialogue strategy.
Objectives
- To raise awareness of the importance of interreligious and intercultural dialogue.
- To map existing initiatives with a view to significantly scaling-up the visibility and resourcing of identified high-impact successful programmes and tools for intercultural dialogue in the region;
- To consolidate an alliance of partners seeking to leverage the impact of their initiatives drawing on existing synergies and complementarities between them.
- To set up an action plan for future activities of the network, based on a common agenda and calendar of activities framed around the major initiatives planned over the coming years.
