The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bogdan Aurescu, will host in New York the 10th Ministerial Conference of the Community of Democracies, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

According to the MAE (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the conference will take place in a hybrid system, and the head of Romanian diplomacy will be joined in New York by Thomas E. Garrett, secretary general of the Community of Democracies.

Also present at the 76th session of the UN General Assembly, Abdulla Shahid, the Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs and Peacebuilding, Rosemary A. DiCarlo, and the President of the United States National Fund for Democracy, Damon Wilson, are among the guests who will speak at the Ministerial Conference of the Community of Democracies.

The 10th Ministerial Conference will bring together Ministers of Foreign Affairs and senior officials of Community governments, representatives of civil society, as well as young people and other stakeholders, in order to discuss current challenges and opportunities for democracy, according to the the theme "Democracy and resilience: common goals."

The agenda of the ministerial meeting will include the adoption of a Ministerial Declaration on Democracy and Resilience.

The meeting will also provide an opportunity for an exchange of views on ways and means of upholding, strengthening and defending the common values and principles enshrined in the Warsaw Declaration and preventing regression in democratic institutions and practices.

The ministerial meeting in New York follows the high-level anniversary conference of the Community of Democracies, hosted on June 26, 2020, by Minister Bogdan Aurescu, in online format, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The event was attended by former US Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, founder of the Community of Democracies, as a keynote speaker.

At the same time, during the anniversary conference of 2020, the Bucharest Declaration of the Governing Council of the Community of Democracies was adopted, which marked two decades since the adoption of the Warsaw Declaration, reaffirming the topicality of the principles adopted at the establishment of the community.

The last ministerial meeting of the Community of Democracies in physical format took place in 2017, in Washington D.C., during the US Presidency of the CoD. AGERPRES (RO - author: Oana Ghita, editor: Florin Marin, EN - author: Cristina Zaharia, editor: Adina Panaitescu)