Invitation: Women’s workshop in Istanbul, September 23-25 2005

Next April, many movements will be present in Athens for the 4th European Social Forum.

A preparatory assembly of the European Social Forum will take place in Istanbul the 23-25 of September 2005.

On this opportunity, the Greek co-ordination of the WMW proposes that a women’s meeting is organized. The appeal for this meeting is addressed to all organizations, collectives and movements fighting for women’s rights in whole Europe, stressing especially the countries of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Mediterranean region. In this meeting, we would like to examine the possibility and the willingness for organizing a women’s day and a women’s assembly in the ESF of 2006, to safeguard the continuity of the feminists’ participation in the process of the mixed social fora.

The framework of the discussion of this meeting should be our ambition to continue with our feminist achievements which emerged on the one hand in the course of the cycle of the three previous ESF (Florence in 2002, the women’s day in Paris in 2003, the feminist network for the Euroconstitution in London 2004) and more recently the women’s assembly in Barcelona in the Mediterranean Social Forum in 2005, and on the other hand from our big international autonomous mobilizations and activities which were organized according to each occasion or assisted, by the several actual women’s networks in Europe, among which our network of the WMW which contributed greatly in Brussels 2000, Vigo 2004, Marseilles 2005.

We think that the organization of a women’s day and a women’s assembly in the ESF in Athens 2006 will only be useful if this new international come-together is based on previous achievements, but also if it has the ambition to offer an innovative spirit and new ideas in the running process. Moreover, it will be an opportunity to enlarge the relations with the women’s and feminist movements in the Balkans, the eastern countries, and include in the networks the women of the Mediterranean (particularly those that participated in the Mediterranean Social Forum). Finally, the success will depend if the activities of April 2006 are embraced and supported by a great number of feminist organizations and movements.

The methodology that could define the architecture and the framework of this new Europe-wide meeting of our movements, could have the objective to give us the concrete means for realizing the proposals for work and the common campaigns, which have emerged from the previous meetings, to enrich our platforms for European demands, to generate a new way of communication at a European level among the feminist and women’s rights forces, networks and thematics.

We therefore appeal to all the recipients of this initiative, to come to Istanbul so that we can elaborate in common our activities, interventions, proposals.

Please disseminate this appeal.

Please reply to: assemb.europ.women@ras.eu.org, rozamit@internet.gr, svovou@otenet.gr, m.limonis@sandgadv.gr