Conference on the future of Europe
What is the Conference on the Future of Europe?
The Conference is a series of initiatives organised by the European Union.
These initiatives will shape the future of the European Union.
These initiatives involve and can be led by citizens and civil society organisations.
One of the initiatives is a website called FuturEu, usable in all official EU languages. In this website you can share your ideas about the European Union. You can comment on other people’s proposals. You can also organise and attend events discussing different ideas for the future of the EU.
Other initiative is the European Citizens’ Panels. These are groups of 200 people, from all Member States reflecting European diversity.
The third and main initiative is the Conference Plenary. The citizen’s ideas in the FuturEu website and in the Citizens panels will be discussed by this Plenary. This is a group of 433 people representing the EU, national authorities and citizens. They will follow up on all the different themes and proposals from the Conference.
The Conference will have 9 main topics, but there will be space for other ideas. The topics are:
- Climate change and the environment.
- Health
- Stronger economy, social justice and jobs
- EU in the world
- Values and rights, rule of law and security
- Digital transformation
- European democracy
- Migration
- Education, culture, youth and sport
How can you participate?
You can contribute with your ideas in the FuturEu platform.
You can also organise an event about the Future of Europe. You can add the event and its conclusions in the FuturEU platform.
You can also contact us if you wish to organize an event in partnership with us.
What do we think about the Conference?
- We must take part on the discussions shaping the future of EU. Persons with disabilities must be proportionally represented in the Citizens’ panels.
- EU institutions need to ensure a high level of accessibility of the digital tools, materials and meetings of the Conference.
- The different topics of the Conference must address the specific situation of persons with disabilities.
What is EDF doing?
- We contributed to the Civil Society Convention report on the Conference on the Future of Europe. The report draws several recommendations to ensure a sustainable and inclusive European future, including: ensuring the privacy of disability and health-related sensitive data, the accessibility of EU elections, freedom of movement on an equal basis, universal access to quality education for all, a truly inclusive digital transformation, and much more. (June 2022)
- We published an opinion piece about the Conference on the Future of Europe on Social Europe’s website, explaining how the Conference fell short of addressing the needs and rights of over 100 million people in the EU. (May 2022)
- With CERMI, and CERMI Women’s Foundation organise, we co-organised the #OurFuture conference on women and girls with disabilities, feeding into the Conference on the Future of Europe and EDF’s work on the rights of women and girls with disabilities in light of the 25th year anniversary of our organisations. (April 2022)
- We published ideas on the Conference website about ensuring accessibility of quality healthcare services to all, making cross-border healthcare accessible to persons with disabilities, ensuring the right to vote and stand as candidate for persons with disabilities. (December 2021)
- We demanded that the platform of the Conference on the Future of Europe must fix its accessibility problems. (September 2021)
- Our President, Yannis Vardakastanis, represents us in the plenary of the Conference. He addressed the first plenary to express concern about the lack of accessibility of the conference and the Conference not reaching underrepresented people. (June 2021)
- We wrote an open letter to the co-chairs of the Conference demanding that persons with disabilities are represented proportionately. (May 2021)
- We demanded that the Citizen’s panels are more inclusive. (May 2021)
- We organised an event on the future of rail travel. (May 2021)
- We are partners in the 25% project. This project is led by the European Youth Forum, and focus on youth participation in the conference. The project will gather a lot of ideas from Europe’s young people, who make up 25% of the population, on how to improve Europe. Ideas will be presented to policy-makers, feeding into the process of the Conference on the Future of Europe.
- We are part of the Civil Society Convention on the Future of Europe.