Global Week of Action for a World Parliament launched in Buenos Aires

A first event of this year’s Global Week of Action for a World Parliament was held last Tuesday at the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires. The founding member of the Argentine organization Democracia Global, Fernando Iglesias, presented the international Campaign for a UN Parliamentary Assembly to an eager auditorium of more than 30 graduate and undergraduate students of international relations and political science.

In his presentation Mr. Iglesias pointed out that a UN Parliamentary Assembly would be a forum that allows for the discussion of global problems from the perspective of the world’s citizens and not only narrow national interests, in particular climate change, human rights violations, or transnational crime, among others. According to the well-known Argentine author, the industrial and technological revolutions of the last two centuries have propelled globalization processes that directly affect all citizens of the world. He called on all world citizen’s to “think a global community with shared problems and challenges, in a global context marked by diversity”.

The former member of parliament said that once citizens and politicians become aware that solutions adopted by a new global parliamentary forum favor the world community as a whole, the focus on narrow national interests would fade in the background. In this sense, Mr. Iglesias stressed that this idea of political integration to advance the common good was already reflected by the European Union which, despite its shortcomings, has managed to maintain peace in Europe for more than 70 years and helped to overcome historic national rivalries.

The Global Week of Action for a World Parliament is an annual event celebrated for one week in October around United Nations Day on the 24th. During this week independent events worldwide are held to promote the establishment of a democratically elected world parliament.

The issue of a world parliament will be one of the topics at the Global Justice conference at Yale University in New Haven from 28th to 30th October.