The Greens/EFA Group

Myself and my Green Party colleague, Dublin MEP Ciarán Cuffe, are members of the Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament.

The Greens/European Free Alliance is a political grouping made up of Green, Pirate and Independent MEPs as well as MEPs from parties representing stateless nations and disadvantaged minorities.

In this form, the group was established in July 1999, when two progressive European political families agreed to join forces in the European Parliament.

The Greens/European Free Alliance is working for:

• Economic and social reforms to make development sustainable for both human beings and the natural world;
• A democratic process linking trade, security, economic and social issues to environmental, cultural and democratic rights;
• High ecological, social and democratic standards to ensure quality of life;
• Solidarity, guaranteed human and citizen’s rights for everybody, including people who have come from non-EU countries;
• A foreign policy designed to resolve problems by peaceful means rather than by military force;
• Improved structures for democratic participation in political decision-making, involving NGOs, Trade Unions, citizens and civic authorities at all levels, with measures to ensure equal participation of women;
• Guaranteed equal rights and opportunities, as well as cultural and linguistic diversity
• A policy of employment and redistribution of work with special attention to gender issues, in order to end the existing unbalanced division of labour and share the workload more fairly between women and men, ensuring that women are fully able to take part in the formal labour market as well as in political life.
• The involvement of the relevant elected authorities that have constitutional powers in the decisions of the Council of Ministers relating to matters that fall within their competence.

The Greens/EFA project is about building a society that is respectful of fundamental human rights and environmental justice. It’s about enhancing human rights – the rights to self-determination, the right to shelter, to good health, to education, culture, and a high quality of life. We want to see freedom within the world of work increased, not only by tackling unemployment, but also by widening people’s choices and releasing human creative potential.

The Greens/ EFA project is about deepening democracy by decentralisation and the direct participation of people in decision-making that concerns them. It’s about enhancing openness of government in Council and Commission, and making the Commission fully answerable to Parliament.

We work to the ideal of building a European Union of free peoples based on the principle of subsidiarity who believe in solidarity with each other and all the peoples of the world. We work towards seeing the European Union move from the current over-emphasises on its economic conception at the expense of social, cultural and ecological values.

Further Information: https://www.greens-efa.eu/en/