On 27 Sept Rupert Matthews attended the opening of a major retrospective exhibition in the European Parliament highlighting the courageous activities of political dissidents in the Warsaw Pact countries during the 1970s and 1980s.
After the meeting, Rupert Matthews said "The men and women who campaigned against the tyranny of Communist ruler in Eastern Europe were true heroes. They quite literally put their lives on the line, risking death, imprisonment or other punishments for their activities. The nations of Eastern Europe are now free of the evil ideology of Soviet Communism and their people can breath freely again. We must remain constantly alert for attempts to impose restrictions on free speech, free politics or freedom more generally whether those moves come from the right or from the left. The lessons of the past must not be ignored."