Regional preparatory Conference prior to the International Labour Conference (ILC)

The International Labour Conference (ILC) aims to build a global human and trade union rights solidarity network. In order to ensure effective participation of the trade unions at this year’s ILC, several preparatory meetings will take place in different regions of the world. These meetings will be organized by the Human and Trade Unions Rights (HTUR) department of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) in collaboration with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and will then be followed by a global coordination meeting in Brussels.

The regional meetings aim to inform trade unionists about the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) supervisory mechanisms and educate the respective actors at the national level on how to prepare for the thematic discussions that will take place at the ILC. To ensure that the pre-ILC meetings are not isolated but framed in a broader programme with long-lasting impact, long-term trade union campaigns on human and trade union rights will be discussed.

ITUC has found that these meetings also provide a good opportunity to inform affiliates and discuss strategies for other ILC discussions.

Participants of the Regional pre-ILC meetings will be:

• Unions from the relevant region (tbc)
• Members of the human and trade union rights network who are responsible in their unions to deal with the relevant topics to be discussed and will either participate in the ILC or will make the preparations at national level
• Trade unionists from countries which appear in the list of double-footnoted cases and are thus expected to appear before the CAS.

Overall, the regional meeting will make a contribution to a higher effectiveness of trade union coordination and therefore enables national, regional and international authorities to act in answer to the most urgent situations of workers’ rights violations.