CONCORD: European NGO confederation for Relief and Development

Today, more than ever, an increasing number of people still live in unacceptable circumstances, often in violent conflict areas, deprived of the most elementary provisions such as food, water, healthcare and security.
As European citizens, living in this privileged part of the world, we have an obligation to help the people and civil organisations of developing countries to improve living conditions by providing them with financial and political support. Their voices must be heard by Western governments.

By uniting, European development NGOs commit themselves to keep development co-operation high on the political agenda of advanced countries and the European Institutions in particular. European NGOs will continue to make institutions aware of the impact of the European policies and practices and will contribute to the debate to encourage the European Union and its member States to enhance social justice, equality and human rights throughout the world.

Our aims are:
• to promote the rights and responsibilities of citizens, development NGOs and, where relevant to CONCORD’s influencing agenda, civil society as a whole to act in solidarity with those living in poverty and to influence their representatives in governments and EU institutions.
• To influence the EU’s policies and practices so that the Union and its member states enhance social justice, equality and human rights throughout the world.

CONCORD members work together to ensure that:
• The EU and member states are fully committed to comprehensive policies and practice that promote sustainable economic, social and human development, aim to address the causes of poverty, and are based on human rights, gender equality, justice and democracy;
• The rights and responsibilities of citizens and organised civil society, to influence those representing them in governments and EU institutions, are promoted and respected.

CONCORD is committed to transparency about EU interest representation. CONCORD believes that this register fails basic transparency standards and that it does not provide EU lobbying transparency. When registering, we have therefore chosen to give all the relevant information that we consider necessary for lobbying transparency. A credible EU lobbying transparency register should include names of individual lobbyists and the issues that they try to influence, provide precise and comparable financial information on lobbying, ad have effective sanctions to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the information disclosed. IN an effort to arrive at a more objective way of calculating lobbying expenditures, we follow the guidelines that result from consultation with public interest organisations, professionals working on lobbying transparency as well as experts on US lobby disclosure legislation. Our registration is therefore providing a more comprehensive calculation of our expenses for activities that aim to influence the policy formulation and decision-making processes of the European institutions, and a list of those who, on behalf of CONCORD, carry out such activities.

Our registration is based on the guidelines for transparent registration developed by the Civil Society Contact Group and ALTER-EU. You can find the guidelines on “http://www.act4europe.org or http://www.alter-eu.org”

CONCORD as an “interest representative” of people experiencing poverty and social exclusion and the organisations who defend their interests or in which they participate. In that respect in CONCORD we try to engage citizens and civil society organisations in discussing European policies and strategies and to make proposals based on their experience and knowledge. This is part of a general effort to help to ensure a closer link between citizens and political decision making, to try to have the ‘voice’ of people experiencing poverty heard in this decision making and to try to build links between the local, regional, national and EU and international levels

None declared

None declared

None declared

Mrs Meagen Baldwin (Policy Manager)

III - Non-governmental organisations

Non-governmental organisations, platforms and networks and similar