Five students from St Martin's College Sixth Form, Swatar, recently attended the first Euromed Scola meeting in Strasbourg, which brought together 300 students from all 27 EU countries, as well as their Mediterranean neighbours.
Euromed Scola is a unique learning opportunity for 16-18-year-old students to meet and hear different points of view of counterparts from other Euro-Mediterranean countries. It enables them to appreciate the complexity of problems that face the region, and that solutions cannot be achieved by one group or another, but by all these countries speaking and listening to their neighbours in an attempt to solve shared problems.
On the first morning of their three-day visit, the students - Andrea Giallombardo, Patricia Maclang, Camilla Maffei, Fran-cesca Mangion and Luke Saliba - accompanied by sixth form head Tonio Pace, were taken on a tour of Strasbourg, which ended at the city hall, where they were welcomed by the mayor.
In the afternoon, after each national group had introduced itself, the first sessions started. All discussions, organised at the European Parliament (EP), were conducted in Arabic, English or French with simultaneous translations.
Mr Saliba introduced the group from Malta, stressing how the island's position in the middle of the Mediterranean had brought it in contact with elements of European, as well as Middle Eastern and North African cultures, all of which had influenced its own language and culture.
After the introductions, work started in earnest. Students were divided into working groups to discuss one of five topics, prompted by the agenda of the Mediterranean Union: education; freedom of information; immigration; equal opportunities with particular reference to women; and pollution and the environment.
Each group had to come up with a number of resolutions, which had to be approved the next day by all students in a plenary session in the European Parliament's well-known hemicycle.
Proceedings on the second day proved to be a wonderful demonstration of the importance of discussion and compromise. There were evident conflicting attitudes, particularly between the Israeli and Palestinian delegates, and a certain amount of tension emerged when women's rights were being discussed. Notwithstanding this, the student delegates had to agree on what to include in their final document within a short period of time.
In the afternoon, students also had the opportunity to observe a real EP session in progress, using the same chamber they had used earlier that day.
Back at St Martin's College, the five students are giving feedback regarding the experience to their fellow students during Systems of Knowledge seminars.