Jaime García-Legaz, Secretary of State for Trade, stated today at the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom launch that “Spain has still a very important reform agenda ahead”. In this respect, he stated that “the national reform program will include new measures” and that “the Index constitutes an incentive for Spain to become increasingly free from an economic point of view”. 

On January 22, the protests against the Ukrainian government claimed the lives of three victims according to official sources or five according to the opposition. The sorrowful fact is tragically ironic because it happened on the Day of National Unity which celebrates the independence achieved in 1919. But there are at least two more paradoxes.

/29.01.14/.- The FAES Foundation has published a report which asks and answers twenty essential questions about the undergoing secessionist process in Catalonia. Read here the published in spanish,  in catalán or in english

A federal court in Washington and another one in New York have issued a pair of conflicting decisions on the call-tracking program, known as the "Snowden case" or the "cyber-spying case." The former questions the constitutionality of the tracking program while the latter states that the practice complies with the law.

Václav Havel's life (1936-2011) is that of an outstanding humanist who was president of his country without denying the demonstration of sound ethical principles in his intellectual production and dissident militancy. An important playwright and writer, he went down in history for his role in the liberation and architecture of the new Czechoslovakia. When the Soviet empire–morally and economically diminished–began crumbling before the eyes of a rejoiced democratic-liberal West, the small Czech Republic and Slovakia helped bury it with an exemplary peaceful revolution supported by reason and love of freedom. 

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”.