More than a third of Brussels’ inhabitants are foreigners with voting rights in their local elections. But despite many of them working within the EU institutions at the heart of the Continent’s democracy, Belgium has close to the lowest voter participation rate among EU citizens in Europe.
Why? Which barriers do EU mobile citizens face to exercise their political rights? Which initiatives have been developed to tackle the issue?
This is exactly what the “Mobile, included and aware: free movement and political rights of EU mobile citizens” webinar, taking place on January 29th will dig into. With their stories and experiences, Anna Zaremba, EU Rights Coordinator at the European Citizen Action Service (ECAS), and Thomas Huddlestone, leader of VoteBrussels campaign and research director at the Migration Policy Group, will lead the participants to explore the trends, barriers and initiatives of EU citizens that live in an EU country different from their original one (click here to register).
Participants will also have the possibility to make live questions and observations, provide feedback that will be integrated in the following webinars and propose the topic for the last webinar.
When: January 29th 2019, 3PM-4PM
Who: We invite all professionals (CSOs, public authorities, companies) and citizens interested in citizen engagement, political participation and expat-related services, such as offices/ platforms/ blogs/ services supporting the arrival and integration of newcomers.
Registration: Please click here to register for the webinar (free of charge).
This webinar is part of a six-part series that will take place once per month starting from January until June. Developed by the European Association for Local Democracies (ALDA) in the framework of the FairEUproject, they aim to foster the successful inclusion of EU mobile citizens in their host EU country’s civil and political life. Through exploring the barriers EU mobile citizens face to exercise their political rights and what initiatives have been developed to tackle the issues, the webinars are designed to encourage solution-orientated discussions and engagement.
The 6 webinars will be with a duration of about 1 hour each. Drawing on FairEU project’s results and on the experience of invited specialist speakers, the webinars will be devoted every time to a different aspect: stakes and tools to increase the turnout of EU elections, facts and learning from last Brussels’ elections, the Road Trip Project to foster youth’s support to EU, reports on political participation of EU mobile citizens in the European countries.
We are also happy to inform that you can receive updates about the outcome of every webinar and the introduction of the following ones by subscribing to this monthly, 5-minute-reading-time newsletter (subscription form).