The European Committee of the Regions and the Council of Europe's
Congress of Local and Regional Authorities both celebrate their 25th
anniversary this year. To mark the occasion, a ceremony will be held in
the European Parliament during the European Committee of the Regions'
June plenary session. Committee president Karl-Heinz Lambertz and
congress president Anders Knape will both give speeches.
The ceremony will be followed later in the day by a
joint conference
at the Committee of the Regions on “The added value of local and
regional authorities in building a united Europe”. The aim is to
highlight the synergies between the work of the two institutions with a
view to strengthening local self-government and regional democracy, a
priority common to the committee and the congress.
The conference will consist of two discussion panels on
decentralisation and the state of local and regional democracy, as well
as its practical implementation in the Member States, based on the
example of the fight against climate change.
The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of
Europe and the European Committee of the Regions have signed a
cooperation agreement
that formalises the fields and methods of cooperation between the
two institutions. This agreement, signed in 2005 and revised in
2018, forms part of the wider context of the 2007 Memorandum of
Understanding between the European Union and the Council of Europe.
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