Just like we did for the last two Agorae (namely Spring Agora Patra and Autumn Agora Cagliari) this year again we want to provide you with a short and easy summary of the proposals submitted for Spring Agorasturias. In this first round, we will be explaining you three proposals that are aimed at improving the CIA, namely ‘Improving the CIA one step at the time (6): Fixing small mistakes’, ‘Improving the CIA one step at the time (7): Charter of Honorary Members’ and ‘Abolir le français en tant que seconde langue officielle de l’Assemblée générale et des statuts des sections locales’.
Now you may wonder: “What is this CIA you are talking about? Is AEGEE-Europe secretly American?” Simply said, the CIA (Corpus Iuridicum Aegeense) is a document with over a hundred pages containing all the rules which govern AEGEE-Europe. It is therefore considered as the legal framework of the Association, and all members are obliged to follow its provisions. Although no secret agents are involved in it, it is one of the most important documents. In the CIA, which you can read here, you can find for example the Statutes of AEGEE-Europe, the Working Formats of the different bodies and all kind of rules (General Rules, Rules of the Network Commission, Antennae Criteria, etc.).
Now that we know what the changes are about, we can continue to see which ones they actually are! The first two, ‘Improving the CIA one step at the time (6) and (7)’ were submitted by Joris Veenhuis, Claudio Gennaro and Glòria Llopart on behalf of the Juridical Commission and aim – as the name already suggest – to improve the CIA one step at a time. The first one, ‘Fixing small mistakes’, does so by fixing some mistakes that sneaked in over the years and clarifying the Organs of AEGEE-Europe. With this, you can think about mistakes like the wrong article number referred to due to other changes having been made over the years and some unclear things, like the difference between ‘ordinary members’ and ‘honorary members’. You can find all the changes and the reasons for them here.
The second proposal, ‘Charter of Honorary Members’, aims at improving the Charter of Honorary Members, because there turned out to be some questions about it. This proposal doesn’t really affect the content of the Charter, but does try to make it easier to read and understand. The Juridical Commission has also tried to make the Charter a bit smaller by removing some things that don’t really have to be regulated, like the administrative responsibility of the award. The exact changes to achieve an easier to understand Charter of Honorary Members can be found here.
The third proposal, ‘Abolir le français en tant que seconde langue officielle de l’Assemblée générale et des statuts des sections locales’, is submitted by Léa Charlet (Policy Officer on Gender Equality) and Paul Smits (Comité Directeur). It’s written in French to emphasize its aim, namely abolishing French as the official second language of AEGEE-Europe. When reading the CIA, you may notice that at the end of it there is also a translated version in French, and at several points in the CIA you may find French being mentioned as an alternative language for English, for example as the official language of the Agora. Antennae and Working Groups also have to provide a copy of their statutes in English or French, which the proposers think is not necessary. They therefore propose to delete French as the second official language of AEGEE-Europe. All changes made to achieve that, can be found here.
Written by Svenja van der Tol, AEGEE-Nijmegen