/09.12.13/.- FAES Foundation organises from Monday 9 to Friday 13 the second edition of its Middle East and North Africa Visitor Program (the MENA region). Twenty-two young people from thirteen countries of the region will take part in it. The meetings will address the state of human rights after the so-called 'Arab Springs' and issues such as the EU's commitment to freedom and human rights in the MENA region and the importance of political parties, Constitutions and the Rule of Law for the institutional strengthening in said countries will be discussed. 

FAES Foundation organises from Monday 9 to Friday 13 the second edition of its Middle East and North Africa Visitor Program (the MENA region). Twenty-two young people from thirteen countries of the region will take part in it. The meetings will address the state of human rights after the so-called 'Arab Springs' and issues such as the EU's commitment to freedom and human rights in the MENA region and the importance of political parties, Constitutions and the Rule of Law for the institutional strengthening in said countries will be discussed. 

At the congress of young European liberals recently convened in Bucharest, the European Liberal Youth (LYMEC), passed a resolution supporting the "right to decide of stateless nations" proposed by the Joventut Nacionalista de Catalunya (JNC), the youth wing of the CDC. Seeing this tendency actually isn't that strange when talking about Catalonia with young people who claim to be liberal, and who understand that the consistent thing to do with this credo is a "laissez-faire" attitude and not hinder what should be posed, in all naturality, as an open option. 

Seven out of ten Venezuelans believe that the political situation in their country is "bad". The fact that an optimistic people, example of the generosity of our land, surrenders to the complacency of despair is the actual result of implementing XXI century Socialism in the South Seas. Chavism in action has ceased to be a mere inefficient supplier of oil wealth to become the most efficient generator of poverty in the region.

Ramón Jáuregui has said that the PSOE announcement that it will denounce church-state agreements once it returns to government is not mere wishful thinking. He is the one who also promoted an attempt to rectify the PSOE's radical secularism and protected the low portion of Christian socialists in his party while Aznar was in office. Now Jáuregui seems loaded with reason: "the Spanish Church has truly earned it".  

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”.