Walking Next to the Wall (www.walkingnexttothewall.com), is the title of a documentary that is currently being released in several universities and cultural centres in Spain. It has been shot in several cities and towns of Egypt and is a true portrayal of a minority (10 million people) with weight in the Middle East: the Coptic Christians who, from the first century, live in a country that is crucial in the region.

The dissolution of the Euro-sceptic group in the European Parliament EFDD (Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy), the spokesman of which is Nigel Farage, leader of Britain's UKIP (UK Independence Party) was communicated on Wednesday October 15th. The cause was Latvian MEP Iveta Grigule's exit from the group to join the ECR group (European Conservatives and Reformists). This excluded the EFDD of the benefits of being a distinct political group in Parliament by not complying with the requirement of national diversity, needing representatives of at least seven different countries.

The great surprise of the Portuguese elections held on 25 May to elect the European Parliament came from António Marinho e Pinto. The former Chairman of the Bar Association deployed an anti-corruption and anti-party speech in these elections, wrapped in deepening participatory democracy, which has given the MPT (da Terra Party), a hitherto tiny 'centrist, ruralist and nationalist' party, two seats in the European Parliament. Never before had this party attained such electoral performance: it reached more than 7% of the vote.

The mentioning of Leopoldo López as part of a list of political leaders and activists from several countries who have suffered death, imprisonment or persecution, and remembered by Barack Obama during his speech at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York on the eve of the meeting of the UN General Assembly, highlighted the fragility of democratic and constitutional guarantees in Venezuela under the current regime of Nicolas Maduro. On the day of the highest international forum, the half-empty auditorium where Hugo Chavez's successor delivered his peroration, a speech muddled up with alter-globalisation proposals, criticisms of NATO's 'terrorist' actions in Syria and indulgent considerations toward the Islamic State–which he described as a "Frankenstein nursed by the West,"– also...

/05.07.14/.-This morning, 2014 FAES Campus held a roundtable with the representatives of the Venezuelan democratic opposition. They provided a first-hand view of the current situation in Venezuela and analysed the links between democracy and the Rule of Law. María Corina Machado and Julio Borges, Deputies of Venezuela’s National Assembly and Ramón Muchacho, Mayor of Chacao, participated in the conference and were introduced by the Cuban writer Carlos Alberto Montaner.

November 9, 2004 was the fifteenth anniversary of the ?fall? of the Berlin Wall. To commemorate the event, the FAES Foundation organized a series of lectures called ?The Freedom Revolution?, in which twelve figures from the political and intellectual world in the East and West took part. The series was coordinated by Ana Palacio, a member of the Spanish Parliament and former Minister for Foreign Affairs, and it ran from November 2004 to May 2005.One of the main theses of the ?Freedom Revolution? is that the Berlin Wall did not collapse of its own accord. The Wall was pulled down by the determination of people who risked their lives in order to regain their freedom. If the Wall fell it was also because of the steadfastness of a generation of politicians who were determined to stop the advance of totalitarian tyranny despite of the incomprehension of a large proportion of intellectuals in the West. These efforts helped to bring freedom and peace to the other side of the Iron Curtain.Some of the eye witnesses of that time, many of whom played key roles in the process, took part in the lecture series and explained their vision of events and their response. Helmut Kohl, Bronislaw Geremek, Giovanni Sartori, Nicolas Baverez, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Jesús Huerta de Soto, Francis Fukuyama, Guy Sorman, André Glucksmann, Richard Perle, Joseph Weiler and Christopher DeMuth took us through what happened in the Freedom Revolution. Their words, their memories and their teachings, given in the Great Hall of San Pablo-CEU University, are gathered together in this volume, which also includes the introductions made by José María Aznar, AnaPalacio and José María Lassalle.The FAES Foundation would like to give special thanks to Noah Clarke, Carmelo López-Arias, Elena Segura, Jessica Zorogastua and Miguel Ángel Quintanilla Navarro for their work in putting together this publication.We would also like to thank the Rector of San Pablo-CEU University, José Alberto Parejo Gámir, for the magnificent facilities offered by the university, which made this lecture series possible.

Europe is in the throes of two simultaneous crises: on the one hand, it is suffering from a political crisis, a crisis of leadership, one that has led to constitutional failure; on the other, it is suffering from a loss of identity, a phenomenon that results in cultural relativism. Marcello Pera, Speaker of the Italian Senate and Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Pisa, delivered a conference entitled “Strength of Identity” during the course of the FAES Campus 2005, a paper which the FAES Foundation is now publishing. Also known as the co-author of the book Senza Radici (“Without Roots”) alongside Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Professor Pera urges European culture to proudly recall and reaffirm its origins and its universal democratic principles: freedom, equality and tolerance. In this respect, Europe must recognise the intrinsic value of a civilisation, Western civilisation, that has given the world so many universal ideas. “Europe must be aware of the moral superiority of a series of values that have prevailed over centuries and that have produced beneficial results wherever they have become established”.