Address by His Excellency George Vella, President of Malta at the Young Mediterranean Voices Regional Leadership Seminar Sant’Anton Palace, 22 November 2019
Welcome Address by His Excellency George Vella, President of Malta at the Young Mediterranean Voices Regional Leadership Seminar Sant’Anton Palace, 22 November 2019 Theme for Day 5: Practicing Advocacy Director of the MEDAC, Professor Stephen Calleya Head of the European Commission Representation, Elena Grech Dear Youth Leaders, - Welcome to Sant’ Anton Palace. It is a real pleasure to be here with you this morning. I want to start off, by thanking Professor Calleya and MEDAC, who together with the Anna Lindh Foundation organised this second Regional Leadership Seminar within the ambit of the Young Mediterranean Voices. - I understand that in the past four days you have already discussed cultural intelligence, climate change, migration, journalism and the media, the set up of the European Union and its Neighbourhood policy. A sincere well done for the choice of topics as these are very topical themes. - As some of you might be aware, the Young Mediterranean Voices Initiative was launched by Federica Mogherini during the 2016 Anna Lindh Foundation MED FORUM that was held in Valletta. During that time, I was still serving as Minister for Foreign Affairs and this initiative was very much at the heart of Malta’s policy towards giving a fresh impetus to the Mediterranean Dialogue. - Malta had maintained that ‘throughout this broad effort on multiple fronts and at different levels we must however bear one thing firmly in mind. We need to engage young people directly and ensure that they themselves are a part of this conversation. It is the most natural thing in the world for us to do whatever we can to protect our children, be they teenagers or young adults, but we need to realise that in order to render our efforts in the context of anti-radicalisation more effective, we need to listen to their 1 views as well.
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