Patrons

Stéphane Hessel was a diplomat, ambassador, writer, concentration camp survivor, former French Resistance fighter and BCRA agent. Born German, he became a naturalised French citizen in 1939. He participated in the editing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. In 2004 he was awarded the North-South Prize by the Council of Europe and in 2008 the UNESCO/Bilbao Prize for the Promotion of a Culture of Human Rights. In October 2010, his essay Time for Outrage! (original French title: Indignez-vous !) was published in an edition of 6,000 copies. It has sold more than 3,5 million copies worldwide and has been translated in more than 14 languages. In 2011, one of the names given to the Spanish protests against corruption and bipartisan politics was Los Indignados (the outraged). These protests, in conjunction with the Arab Spring, later helped to inspire other protests in many countries, including Greece, the UK, Chile, Israel and Occupy Wall Street. In 2011, Stéphane Hessel was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers “for bringing the spirit of the French Resistance to a global society that has lost its heart.”

• "Les hommes ont besoin de la culture", interview on Rue89.com, published on March 30, 2013 (FR)

Ambassador of Palestine at the European Union, Belgium and Luxembourg since December 2005, Leila Shahid served as General Delegate of Palestine in France between 1993-2005, Unesco 1993-1996, the Netherlands 1990-1993, Ireland 1989 - 1990. Born in exile in Lebanon of Palestinian parents, Leila Shahid studied Anthropology at the American University in Beirut and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes. Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is married to the Moroccan novelist and literary critic Mohammed Berrada. Leila Shahid believes in the importance of culture and art in her political and diplomatic work and initiated the two important cultural events on contemporary Palestinian art and culture in France in 1997, Le Printemps Palestinien, in collaboration with the Quai d’Orsay and l’Institut du Monde Arabe and in Belgium in 2008 Masarat, with the Communaute Francaise de Belgique and les Halles de Schaerbek in Brussels. Both events were very well received by the public as witnessed by the massive attendance and the media coverage.

• Leila Shahid participated to the launching event of More Europe, on December 8, 2011.

Dr. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, was elected on 17 June 1999 by the Parliament for a four-year term as President of Latvia and re-elected for a second term in 2003. Outspoken pundit on social issues, moral values, European historical dialogue, and democracy, she was awarded the 2005 Hannah Arendt Prize for political thought. She was named Special envoy on the reform of the United Nations in 2005 and was an official candidate of the Baltic States (Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania) for the position of Secretary General in 2006. After earning a PhD in experimental psychology in 1965 from the McGill University in Montreal (Canada), she pursued a professorial career at the Department of Psychology of the French-speaking University of Montreal and conducted scholarly research on semiotics, poetics and the structural analysis of computer-accessible texts from an oral tradition -- the Latvian folksongs (Dainas). In June 1998 she was elected Professor emerita at the University of Montreal and returned to her native land, Latvia, where on 19 October the Prime Minister named her Director of the newly founded Latvian Institute. Since 1999, she has received many medals and awards, twenty-seven Orders of Merit and ten honorary doctorates.

• On December 4, 2012, Dr. Vaira Vike-Freiberga spoke at the opening session of the More Europe "One Year On" event in Brussels. Read more about her intervention in our Speakers section or on her official website.

Paavo Lipponen

_{photo Johannes Jansson, via Wikimedia Commons}