Liberal Vision COVID19 Round Up

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Dear friends and colleagues,

On the ﬁrst day of the sacred month of Ramadan, and at a time when COVID-19 is ravaging our people’s health and nations’ economies, I wish health, peace, wisdom and humility to all our earth’s inhabitants.

As ever, I hope you are coping well with conﬁnement, keeping a physical distance but making sure to maintain crucial social contacts. We must keep hope that humanity will triumph over this crisis, that solidarity will triumph over individualism, that international cooperation will triumph over nationalism and that wisdom and humility will guide our future actions.

Although COVID-19 is a threat to us all, our human ingenuity means that there is also opportunity in a post-crisis world for reforms and improvements in many sectors of society, involving both private and public activity, that have been affected by the crisis. We have been given a rare moment in history to restart our engines, to reshape our systems of production and democratic models to include more societal strata than ever before and to ensure that growth leads to a sustainable and fair form of prosperity.

The good news is that these reforms are mutually beneﬁcial, any investment made in improving the sustainability of our democracies and economic systems will inevitably beneﬁt all of us and contribute to continued growth, that would otherwise be impossible in a landscape threatened by climate change and the rise of protectionist, restrictive forms of authoritarian government across the world.

COVID-19 has caused untold suffering over the past few months, but from that suffering have emerged the ingenuity and the resilience of humankind when faced with very real threats to their existence. Communities have come together, ignoring old divisions, to ﬁght the virus and its effects and governments have launched social support projects and economic packages on a scale never before seen in history.

These changes are creating wealth and democratising access to services on an unprecedented scale; in Morocco, online tuition was rolled out across the entire nation which, for the ﬁrst time, meant that children living in most rural areas had access to the highest quality of teacher that the nation has to offer; West African states are revolutionising the way they use mobile technology to communicate with their citizens about virus prevention and transfer of welfare payments; East Asian states, particularly Taiwan, have shown the world what it means to mobilise government resources quickly and effectively in the interest of their citizens’ health; European states and the European Union have proven that multilateral communication and sharing of resources is essential to responding to an attacker that does not respect borders. This list goes on and on but the principle remains the same: our human resilience offers us a real opportunity to re-launch our way of life post COVID-19 in a way that beneﬁts us all and guarantees the sustainability of our lifestyles for future generations.

We, as liberals, urge governments and corporations to continue to act with the same energy and drive when developing their crisis responses.

We urge them to ensure that climate principles are integrated at the heart of all stimulus packages and corporate We urge them to ensure that climate principles are integrated at the heart of all stimulus packages and corporate action plans.

We urge the parliaments of this world to resist the onslaught on anti-democratic rhetoric and, instead, invest in deepening multilateral cooperation in order to ensure that our planet will be better prepared for the next global challenge.

We emerged from the World Wars with a clear understanding that international and multilateral cooperation was the only way to safeguard the continued growth of human society; let us now honour those who have died in this crisis by ensuring that we use it as an opportunity to remake society for the better.

Sincerely,

Dr. Hakima El Haité

Dr Hakima el Haité President of Liberal International

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