History
The CD was inaugurated at its first biennial ministerial conference hosted by the government of Poland in Warsaw on June 25–June 27, 2000. The initiative was spearheaded by Polish Foreign Minister Bronisław Geremek and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, along with six co-conveners: the governments of Chile, the Czech Republic, India, Mali, Portugal and the Republic of Korea.
At the close of the conference the participating governments signed onto the “Warsaw Declaration”, agreeing “to respect and uphold…core democratic principles and practices” including, among others, free and fair elections, freedom of speech and expression, equal access to education, rule of law, and freedom of peaceful assembly.
In closing remarks to the ministerial conference in Warsaw, the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan praised the Community of Democracies as a positive development toward global democracy, saying. “When the United Nations can truly call itself a community of democracies, the Charter's noble ideals of protecting human rights and promoting "social progress in larger freedoms" will have been brought much closer."
Since the original conference in Warsaw, the chairmanship has been held by South Korea, Chile, and Mali, and each chair country hosted additional ministerial conferences: Seoul in 2002 (which produced the Seoul Plan of Action), Santiago in 2005 (which produced the Santiago Commitment), and Bamako in 2007 (which produced the Bamako Consensus). Following the Bamako Ministerial in November 2007, Portugal assumed Chairmanship of CD and will be the host of the next ministerial conference. João Gomes Cravinho, Portugal’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, was named by Portugal to coordinate its Chairmanship of CD.
Read more about this topic: Community Of Democracies
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“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
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“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
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