Africa and Europe
EN | IT – “Bring back our girls”. It’s the slogan which is getting around the whole world to call attention to the destiny of the over two hundred schoolgirls kidnapped in the north of Nigeria by Boko Haram militants. Thanks to the engagement of TV stars and political leaders this slogan has succeeded in drawing the attention of the media on a crisis which has stayed in the news background too long. This crisis runs the risk of destabilizing a Nation that is important for its economy, demography and politics, and its consequences could be felt much farther than Nigerian borders.
EN | IT – New landings of people and families from Africa and the Middle East keep taking place on the shores of Sicily. Our neighbors, on the other coasts of the same Mediterranean Sea do not resign themselves to living in situations of war, poverty, persecution, but have set off and moved. What should we do?
EN | IT – There are demanding words in the concluding paragraph of the document that the bishops of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (Secam) presented to the Eu on the occasion of the fourth Africa-Eu Summit last 2-3 April. The bishops had already expressed these reflections and proposals in a pastoral letter issued in February 2013, perhaps with little echo here in Europe.
EN | IT – This was a Summit with neither winners nor losers, where African and European leaders strived to defend the status quo rather than reach more ambitious goals.
This is a good way to summarize the outcome of the EU-Africa Summit which took place in Brussels on April 2nd and 3rd: a two-day meeting that was characterized by a great deal of institutional “fair play” to avoid clashes, but disappointed those who expected continental relations to be effectively relaunched.
EN | FR | IT – In the next few days, April 2-3, the leaders of Africa and Europe will gather in Brussels for the 4th EU-Africa Summit, seven years after their previous meeting in Lisbon.
It will be an important opportunity especially for the European Union, which is called to rethink its relationship with the African continent. In 1950, in what is known to history as the Schumann Declaration, the then French foreign minister wrote: “Europe shall be able, with increased resources, to pursue the implementation of one of its fundamental tasks: the development of the African continent”.
