Last year's widely noted international conference on the Holocaust is being followed up this year with a conference even more tangibly concerned with everyday strategies for combating and preventing intolerance in our societies. Politicians, researchers and experts from several countries will gather for a couple of days in common search of ways of combating and preventing racist and anti-democratic ideas. We will be meeting to augment our combined knowledge and to discuss ways in which insights, experiences and research findings can contribute towards concrete actions at local, national and international levels. The growth of intolerance is one of the crucial issues of our time. Efforts against it need to be coordinated, but responsibility for making them devolves on all of us.
All human beings are of equal dignity.
No one is entitled to affront, threaten or persecute anyone else. This ought to be selfevident. We must not close our eyes when human dignity is challenged. History has taught us what can happen when democratic and humanistic values are allowed to crumble away. When we see how racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and homophobia lead to violence and persecution of individuals or groups of people, we have to react - each and every one of us.