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Democracy and Equality for all

Democracy and Equality for all

  • Democratic reconstruction of Europe is an urgent task today.
  • All human beings have the right o participate in the shaping of Europe, whether born there or not. The EL stands for the strengthening of individual rights, freedom, social rights, political rights and freedom.
  • The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights must become legally binding and further developed.

 

Gender 

  • It is imperative to fully guarantee equality between women and men.
  • The EL strives for a European regulation guaranteeing the right of women to decide on their bodies, free contraception and abortion within the public health system.
  • The EL decisively supports the criminalization of any gender violence and highlights that sufficient support has to be given to all victims.


Discrimination

  • The EU must not only protect but also promote the rights of all victims of discrimination because of their ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, ideology, disability and age. The EL demands the respect for all ethnic minorities and therefore consistent and active steps against racism, xenophobia, ultra-nationalism, chauvinism, fascism, anticommunism, homophobia, or any other form of discrimination.
  • The EL stands clearly for a secular Europe with secular state policies.


Work

  • Europe must have a democratized economy. We reject the subordination of social and trade unions’ standards to the so called "European freedoms" as ruled out by the European Court of Justice. On the contrary, the rights and opportunities of workers to participate in management decisions must be enlarged and fixed by law.


Culture

  • The EL stands for an EU cultural policy based on intercultural dialogue and education. The EL supports the UNESCO Convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions, which envisages the preservation and promotion of the diversity of regional cultures to become binding under international law.
  • It is necessary to fight back the unlimited liberalization of cultural services.
  • The dialogue between cultures can become the basis of a pacifist policy at all geographic levels.


Media

  • The EL demands a transparent media policy. The key areas of social and economical life are increasingly dependent on the production, storage and conversion of information and knowledge. Therefore, the access to communication and information, as well as their production, are essential for democracy both at national and European level.
  • Democratization of public media service structures is therefore essential.
  • At the same time, privacy must be protected in the digital domain, as well as the free access to codes and programming. These are also tools to challenge digital capitalism.


Education

  • Education is a human right.
  • It is necessary to abolish the Bologna process and the subordination of education until the highest level, as well as research, to the profit makers of the free market. Universities need to be free from the strict logic of the markets.
  • We clearly stand for a public and free education.
  • Schools must be a place of healthy, free confrontation and coexistence between different cultures and religions, which are necessary premises for an education in peace integrating gender equality.


Direct participation

  • The EP must be given the power of legislative initiative.
  • Direct participation processes on landmark decisions must be guaranteed also at European level, for example by means of referendums.
  • All European institutions must be open to civil society, enabling ctizens to control the institutional decisions.
  • Unjustifiable “anti-terror” measures jeopardizing our freedom should be abolished.


Cosmopolitan Europe

  • We want a cosmopolitan Europe open to migration and not a fortress Europe repelling people in need.
  • We defend a common EU refugee and migration policy in accordance with the Geneva Convention.
  • The EL is in favour to include gender related and nongovernmental prosecution as grounds for asylum and call for the specific protection of child refugees.
  • We are against FRONTEX and the implementation of the "Pact on migration and asylum". Coherently, we are also against the “return directive” and the closing of detention camps.
  • We oppose the mechanisms of "preventive repression” and “preventive filling of personal data” (Prym Treaty), which creates suspects and makes personal data available for several entities including private companies.


The Platform proposals and positions are of course not to be closed after the electoral outcome; on the contrary, they are part of the EL consistent and declared goals, and will be determinedly taken to the newly elected European Parliament as well as to other institutions and to the field of  social and popular struggle, independently of the electoral calendar:

A peaceful, social, ecological, democratic, and feminist Europe living in solidarity.
 

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(To read about other subjects and proposals, return to the index of chapters...)

This is an informal synthesis of a section from the EL Electoral Platform, which is available here in 7 national versions and languages.