Amnesty International Australia's National Extraordinary General Meeting was held from Friday 27 November to Sunday 29 November 2009.

Achieving Greater Human Rights Impact

In November 2009, Amnesty International Australia held a National Extraordinary General Meeting (NEGM), in addition to the National Annual General Meeting (NAGM) which was held 'virtually' in June 2009. The NAGM dealt with the 'business only' matters such as confirming the minutes from last year's NAGM, considering the 2008 Annual Report and similar items. NEGM's focus was how we achieve our vision to achieve greater human rights impact in all aspects of Amnesty International Australia's work.

The NEGM included our traditional human rights conference components such as workshops, plenary sessions with external speakers as well as our own, a public action and governance issues such as the passing of resolutions. Also, on the advice of the Youth Advisory Group in 2008, the Amnesty International Australia Youth Summit was folded into the NEGM.

The reason we held an extraordinary meeting in November was to hear your views on how Amnesty International Australia could strengthen our democratic structures, processes and culture to better achieve our vision. To do this, the Board initiated the Strengthening Democracy Project which was conducted over the course of 2009.

Many of you, our supporters, participated in this project and recommendations on our current system of democracy were developed from this feedback. The Board then carefully considered these recommendations. As a result, we put forward a number of special resolutions dealing with constitutional changes to NEGM as well as other resolutions. We held workshops, information sessions and discussions around the feedback from the Strengthening Democracy Project.

NEGM 2009 links