On 7 and 8 March 2025, The Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence for the Rule of Law and European Values (CRoLEV) at UCLan Cyprus, and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law, Alternative and Innovative Methods (ICLAIM) delivered their third and final workshop from the Citizen Empowerment: Sustainable Rule of Law and European Values in Europe Series.

The workshop topic was “Public Assemblies and Deliberative Democracy”, and the aim was to understand and discuss the applicability of tools for participatory civic engagement. More specifically, the workshop was designed to engage with the Council of Europe’s principles of participatory democracy, discuss the differences between participatory and deliberative democracy, and consider which tools are more appropriate to apply in local contexts of civic engagement. This final workshop comes after investigating the relevance of non-formal dispute resolution initiatives to the sustaining of the rule of law in the first workshop in December 2022, and following the introduction of the Council of Europe Participatory Democracy Academy in November and December 2023

Participants shared insightful and informative observations and discussed the settings in which tools of participatory and deliberative democracy can be effective. We, the organisers, hope that this workshop will be an opportunity for the wider use of the disseminated tools in nonformal social settings for small-scale democratic dialogue and the organic advancement of active citizenship. 

The workshop was delivered at UCLan Cyprus by trainers Dr Katerina Antoniou, ICLAIM resident expert and Assistant Professor in Tourism and International Relations, Dr Nadia Kornioti, ICLAIM resident expert and Associate Lecturer in International and Comparative Public Law, and Dr Haris Shekeris, Independent Expert in Deliberative Democracy and Philosopher.

The workshop was delivered through the following sessions:

For more information on all projects mentioned you may visit the websites available through the links above. You may also welcome to contact directly the CRoLEV team at: crolev@uclancyprus.ac.cy.