The APE is a trans-partisan political organisation. It brings together MEPs belonging to different political groups and members of the diplomatic and consular corps of Strasbourg.
It will co-host a meeting in Strasbourg next week which aims to highlight problems still facing both EU citizens in the UK and British nationals in the EU. Attendees will discuss the future of free movement and European citizenship.
The event during the parliamentary plenary is also being organised by New Europeans, a group that campaigns for citizens’ rights for people on both sides of the channel.
On Monday, its founder and secretary general, Roger Casale, told this website, “This meeting coming up in Strasbourg is really important for us and it’s wonderful that the European Parliamentary Association are supporting us in this way.
The audience at the APE event will be composed of MEPs, diplomats from the Council of Europe, young people, such as students from the University of Strasbourg, and members of organisations such as the Young European Federalists.
Others attending will be MEPs such as Herbert Dorfmann, President of the European Parliamentary Association, Elmar Brok, and Claude Moraes, Chair of Parliament’s civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee.
Also speaking will be Frédérique Berrod, professor of public law at Strasbourg University and Madeleina Kay, Young European of the Year.
Casale said, “Free movement is one of the pillars of the single market. With the 1992 Maastricht Treaty free movement became associated with a new concept, European citizenship.
“As the European Union opened its internal borders and embraced new member states in Central and Eastern Europe, European citizenship came to stand for an identification with the values that underpin the European project - the values of the enlightenment, of liberty, equality and solidarity.
“Today it is these values and this sense of a shared European identity that is under threat - from populism, nationalism and xenophobia as well as from external threats such as instability in the states that border the Mediterranean in the Middle East and parts of North Africa and the deliberate attempt to interfere in our democratic processes by states such as Russia.”