Annual Report 2022

Dear Members and Friends of the Collegium ORL Amicitiae Sacrum

I hope you are all doing well at the end of this eventful year. Several crises are currently plaguing the world – this is the time for us to strengthen and build what we know to be valuable. We are motivated to continue advancing scientific collaboration and communication of our latest research through CORLAS. This year’s Annual Meeting showed that all our efforts have paid off.

We have a special reason to thank our President Marcos Goycoolea, Vice President Hamlet Suárez and their local organizing committee, who were deeply committed to their work and organized an unforgettable Annual Meeting 2022 in Santiago de Chile. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Annual Meeting had been postponed twice (instead, we organized Zoom Meetings in 2020 and 2021) and the live meeting could only be organized in November 2022. This particularly successful event reinforced our confidence regarding the operations and future of CORLAS after two years of remote activities. The Board has held several remote meetings during the past year to discuss the functions of our society. One significant structural change is that CORLAS will now be an officially registered society.

We have also entered into an agreement with a company providing association management services (GUARANT International, based in Prague, Czech Republic) regarding secretarial and administrative tasks. The members have already received correspondence from the company during the past year regarding contact details that need to be updated in our registry. In this report you will find the Minutes of the Board Meeting and the General Assembly 2022.

 

Antti Mäkitie
General Secretary

Annual Report 2022

 

 

CORLAS supports Ukraine!

The world-wide leadership and the undersigned members of the Collegium Oto-Rhino-Laryngologicum Amicitiae Sacrum (CORLAS) condemn President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and the violence and humanitarian disaster it has caused.

CORLAS was founded in 1926 following World War I, by Charles Emile Benjamins and Adriaan De Kleyn, to exchange scientific knowledge and to bring together physicians and scientists of Europe and to bind up and heal the wounds of war. Today President Putin’s unprovoked military aggression against its neighbor Ukraine is too reminiscent of Hitler’s actions invading Poland, which led to WWII. We choose our words carefully as we do not believe that the Russian people have a role in this aggression. In fact, many have bravely protested and been jailed as they also condemn Putin’s actions.

We seek peaceful means to resolve disputes.  The actions of Putin blatantly violate the United Nations Charter, which says “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”  He ignores the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which obligated Russia and others to respect the sovereignty, independence, and existing borders of Ukraine.

 

We join the over 200 Nobel Prize laureates in “condemning these military actions and President Putin’s essential denial of the legitimacy of Ukraine’s existence”:

 “Russia’s security concerns can be addressed within the framework of the UN Charter, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, and the 1999 Paris Charter. To make war, as President Putin and his collaborators have done, is an unwarranted, bloody, and unproductive way to a future.

The Russian invasion will stain the international reputation of the Russian state for decades to come. It will pose barriers to its economy and inflict hardships on its population.  The sanctions imposed will restrict the ease of movement of its talented and hardworking people in the world. Why raise this fence between Russia and the world now?

Hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers, Russian soldiers, and Ukrainian civilians, including children, have died already. It’s so sad, so unnecessary. We gather in this appeal to call upon the Russian government to stop its invasion of Ukraine and withdraw its military forces from Ukraine.

We respect the calm and the strength of the Ukrainian people. We are with you. Our hearts go out to the families and friends of all, Ukrainians and Russians, who have died and been injured already. May peace come to this piece of our beautiful world.”

 
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