Six EUNICE students attended the European Students Assembly held in Strasbourg, where about 275 students gathered to debate several topics of concern to the youth of Europe. “It is important that students themselves prepare the environment for new initiatives,” stated Paweł Śniatała, EUNICE project leader and Vice-Rector for International Relations at Poznań University of Technology, in Poland.
In line with Śniatała, Carlos Santos, student from the Spanish University of Cantabria (UC), assured that this meeting enabled young people “to develop different proposals to improve the European Union” and, as José María Cueto, another student form UC, said, “to address its crucial challenges.” For the student coming from the Belgian University of Mons, Ahmed Hammoudeh, “it was interesting to learn about some of Generation Z’s perspectives on the EU values.”
The addressed topics were presented in ten different panels, from European common values as, among others, cybersecurity, public health, democracy, climate refugees or inclusiveness. Inclusiveness was, in fact, one of the main values that encouraged EUNICE’s students to attend the Assembly, and it is the common thread of the Manifesto on the Future of Universities in Europe emerged from this meeting, which talks about diversity, multiculturalism and multilingualism, aiming at achieving joint European degrees and ensuring an “effective mobility” as “one of the keystones of the future o universities at the European scale.”
Gaston Lahmar, who studies at Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, highlighted that this assembly “was an extremely rich moment from a cultural point of view and extremely productive from a work point of view.”
It is planned that this inaugural session will lead to further meetings to give students a voice in the European Union. “To meet and exchange opinions,” that was the basis according to Gaston Lahmar. Carlos Santos and José María Cueto called this event “a fantastic” and “an incredible” opportunity. It was “a real pleasure” for Javier Lanza (UC).
And, championing freedom of speech, Ahmed Hammoudeh wanted to recall that “One day, the statement the Earth revolves around the Sun deserved punishment. Let’s not repeat that again”.
Picture: Gaston Lahmar – José María Cueto – Rekaya Kouchlef – Carlos Santos – Javier Lanza
