Multilateralism in Crisis – Civic Roundtable

The Civic Roundtable is an annual event offering 30 fellows from different European countries and beyond a platform to study trends and challenges and to experiment with various ways to forge better civics across Europe. There have now been four successful editions of the Civic Roundtable.

The third edition of the Civic Roundtable was organised by the Council of Europe, in cooperation with the Association of Schools of Political Studies (ASPS) and Symbiosis-School of Political Studies in Greece. The event was held in Thessaloniki, Greece from 18 to 19 December 2018.

The two-day event included keynote speeches, plenary discussions and work in groups. It was organised around three main questions: 1) How does the present multilateral rules-based global governance relate to current realities? 2) What does it take to maintain the universal appeal of the multilateral human rights system? 3) In a globalized world, can multilateralism safeguard social equality and refugee protection?

Among the experts on multilateralism from different fields who provided keynote presentations were Loukas Tsoukalis, Professor at Sciences Po Paris and President of Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP); Sonia Licht, President of the Belgrade Fund for Political Excellence; Nils Muižnieks, President of the Association of Schools of Political Studies of the Council of Europe and former Human Rights Commissioner for the Council of Europe (2012-2018); and Philippe Leclerc, UNHCR Representative in Greece.