DWARS update

Hi everybody, I am the new representative for European affairs of Dwars, the Dutch young greens. In this article I will describe what is happening in Dwars. First I will shortly explain how Dwars works, for those who have not heard of Dwars. Dwars has a national division and regional divisions. On local level people try to influence local politics. On national level people can get involved in working groups and in the political board and the coordinating board. The working groups work on very varied subjects, from animal rights to philosophy. The political opinion of Dwars is presented by the JongerenFractie (YouthFraction). Each person in the JF has his/her own subjects and they work together on different campaigns. Presently we have eight topics and also eight members of the JF. There is European affairs, justice and internal, foreign affairs, education, multicultural affairs, economics, health and welfare and of course environmental issues.

A lot has happened around the EU in Dwars. Last year during a Dwars conference, our members decided that Dwars says yes to the EU constitution. Last two years our former representative for European affairs had been supporting the no side. He decided to resign from the board because he should have represented a yes otherwise. Dwars didn’t like to see him go, but accepted his decision. Fortunately he’ll remain active in the organisation.

In general, Dwars is busy with the following activities. The campaign that will be finished in April, is the Animal Rights campaign. In this campaign Dwars is writing a Charter for Animal Rights and is organising a congress where several issues concerning this subject are discussed. After this campaign the Sexual (R)evolution starts! Dwars is planning an exiting and evolutional campaign to start a discussion about sexual rights. We are working on this campaign after the idea of FYEG/CDN. We would really like to work on some international actions in different cities in Europe.

Besides these campaigns Dwars organises many debate events, attractive and good actions and many more things aimed at involving young people in politics and to influence the politics in the interest of young green people. I myself for example am organising a Europe day to discuss the future of Europe and to celebrate the EU’s birthday.

If you want to know more about Dwars, you can look at www.dwars.org, if your Dutch is good and otherwise you can contact me about the campaigns or anything else through FYEG. I hope to see you all soon somewhere in Europe!