Maidan

A Free person in a free country!

The “Maidan” Alliance is an informal association of individuals and civic organizations who are seeking to coordinate their efforts on fully developing civic society in Ukraine, as well as a state structure based on law and answerable to the public. We are very different in our likes and dislikes, our views on life, our professions, where we live, and our experience and how actively engaged we are. Nonetheless we decided to liaise and work together for “civic self-defence” in the broadest sense of the term.

The Alliance is an instrument for interaction and not just one more hierarchical structure.

The Alliance is about active participation, and not formal membership.

The Alliance is in its scope much wider than present-day civic organizations and movements.

The Alliance helps different active communities within the public sector find out about each other and coordinate their efforts “here and now” in order to resolve a specific problem.

Participation in the Alliance assumes involvement in one of the existing projects, or initiation of a new project falling within the framework of our strategy. The single restriction is that religious or political associations may not become participants in the Alliance.

The main tasks of the Alliance are: monitoring, active defence, affirmation and broadening of constitutional rights and freedoms in Ukraine in the following key areas:

-- equal access to justice;
-- public participation in local self-government;
-- public participation in developing social policy;
-- public monitoring over the authorities;
-- freedom of peaceful assembly;
-- freedom of information; freedom of speech; freedom of the press, freedom of creative activities;
-- the rights of territorial communities;
-- the right to freely elect and the right to stand for electoral office;
-- the right to a safe environment;
-- the right to education;
-- the right to health care.

The “Maidan” Alliance strategy is outlined in the Maidan Memorandum which can be found at: (http://maidan.org.ua/wiki/index.php/Меморандум_Майдану). The Memorandum contains a list of practical tasks aimed at overcoming post-totalitarianism in Ukraine, affirming the principle that “the authorities answer to the people, society exerts control over the authorities”, defence, affirmation and broadening of rights and freedoms, and the affirmation of the rule of law. The principles of the Maidan Memorandum became the foundation for the program “Informed Choice 2006: An Interactive comparison of voter expectations and the promises of political forces”

The coordination of activists of the Alliance is from the “Maidan” website (http://maidanua.org/)