The European Council of Skeptical Organisations (ECSO) is an umbrella of skeptical organisations in Europe. Founded on 25 September 1994, the ECSO aims to co-ordinate activities of European organisations and individuals that aim at critically investigating pseudoscientific statements and claims regarding observations of paranormal phenomena, and to make the results of its investigations known to the broad public. It means to continue the series of European skeptical congresses that preceded its foundation and supports a biennial congress and a symposium every other year. The Policy of the European Council of Skeptical Organisations states that it strives:
- To promote and defend the highest standards of scientific integrity and practice in research, education, medicine and public policy.
- To oppose the promulgation of claims and practices, including treatments, that are not supported by, or are inconsistent with, scientific knowledge and research, particularly when these may have adverse consequences.
- To encourage the conducting of controlled tests and experiments on such claims and practices, one intention being to demonstrate to the public the broader applications of science and critical thinking. In particular this applies to phenomena commonly identified as ‘paranormal’ of ‘pseudoscientific’. However, no claims, explanations or theories will be rejected in advance of objective evaluation
Board of Directors
Cornelis de Jager served as first chairman until 2001, when he was replaced by Amardeo Sarma (2001–2013). He was followed by Gábor Hraskó (2013-2017) and Claire Klingenberg (2017-2024). The current ECSO board was elected 3 June 2024 and is as follows:
- Pontus Böckman (VoF) – President
- Catherine de Jong (VtdK) – Vice-President
- Amardeo Sarma (GWUP) – Vice-President
- Jean-Luc Bernet (CZLR) – Member
- Paola De Gobbi (CICAP) – Member
- Patricia Fechet (ASUR) – Member
- Michael Heap (ASKE) – Member
- Alice Howarth (MSS) – Member
- András Gábor Pintér (SzT) – Member
- Marianne Rodot (AFIS) – Member
- Tim Trachet (SKEPP) – Member
About the Board members:
Pontus Böckman 
Pontus has a degree in Financial Accounting and has been active in the skeptical movement since 2011. He has been on the board of Vetenskap och Folkbildning, VoF (aka the Swedish Skeptics Association) since 2014, 2018-2023 as president. He maintains the role of international liaison with other skeptic organisations. Since 2017 he represents VoF on the board of ECSO.
Pontus has been involved in the skeptics movement locally and internationally since 2011. He lives in the south Sweden. He has appeared as speaker on among other events the yearly Gothenburg Science Festival and at Skepticamp QED in Manchester. He is also regularly invited as guest speaker at schools and other organisations and private companies, to talk about scientific skepticism and rational thinking.
Since 2015 he is one of the founders and current hosts of the English speaking weekly podcast the ESP (the European Skeptics Podcast).
Catherine de Jong 
Catherine de Jong is an anaesthesiologist. She lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. For 15 years she has been a board member of Vereniging tegen de Kwakzalverij, The Dutch Society Against Quackery, which has been fighting quackery since 1881 and is probably the oldest skeptical society in the world.
During her training as an anaesthesiologist she saw patients in hospital that clearly had suffered physical and mental harm from visiting alternative healers and following their (bad) advice. Becoming a member and later a board member of Vereniging tegen de Kwakzalverij became a way to do something to prevent quacks and alternative healers harming people. She has written articles in Nederlands Tijdschrift tegen de Kwakzalverij and on the website www.kwakzalverij.nl. Together with other board members she writes articles and answers questions of journalists. The organisation provided speakers for radio and TV-programmes, and gives presentation on request. Filing complaints against organisations and persons that publish false health claims on their websites and reporting dangerous alternative healers to health inspection are important tasks of Vereniging tegen de Kwakzalverij.
Amardeo Sarma 
Amardeo Sarma is an engineer with degrees in electrical engineering from IIT Delhi and TU Darmstadt and has been active in the skeptical movement since the mid-1980s. He co-founded GWUP, ECSO, WePlanet and the SDL Forum Society. He is committed to science and critical thinking and has recently written increasingly about global warming, rational solutions, and countering myths about nuclear energy. He has also written on the Shroud of Turin, the historicity of Jesus, modern agriculture and homoeopathy. He coordinated the GWUP’s first dowsing test in 1991, published the results in Skeptiker and clashed with parapsychologists.
He co-founded the association Ökomoderne e. V., now a German-speaking section of WePlanet. In 2023, together with two others, he founded the non-profit company Scientific Temper gUG (haftungsbeschränkt), which promotes scientific thinking, education, especially in schools worldwide, and rational solutions to pending problems. Professionally, he has worked in telecommunications, specification languages and security. Amardeo was General Manager at NEC Laboratories GmbH until 2023 and is now Managing Director of Scientific Temper. He has been a member of the SPD for 45 years.
Jean-Luc Bernet 
Jean-Luc Bernet is retired after having been social worker himself and director of a vocational training centre for social educators in Montpellier. He joined the Cercle zététique du Languedoc-Roussillon (CZLR) in October 2004 and has been its secretary since March 2005. As such he plays an important role in the activity of the CZLR, namely the organisation of its Autumn University, which takes place in Montpellier every end of September since 2011. He is also member of the AFIS. Zététique (“zetetics” in the English version) is a concept which has been launched by Henri Broch in the 90s; it can be understood as “skepticism” as well as “critical” or “rational thinking. Jean-Luc Bernet is also active in movements that support and promote the European federalistic ideal: hence the importance of the ECSO to his personal involvement.
Paola de Gobbi 
Paola De Gobbi, incurably curious about the world, from a very young age found herself caught between the fascination of mystery and the wonder and rigour of science and she discovered very soon the importance of critical thinking in every aspect of life.
Paola is a founding member of the CICAP Veneto group and is a CICAP permanent member since 2004. Over the years she has covered several functions inside CICAP: operational, administrative, editorial (for the magazines Scienza & Paranormale and Magia), event organization (conferences, courses, conventions, etc.), relations with members, local groups and associations. She is a member of the Patronage Commission and she represents CICAP in the board of ECSO, the European Council of Skeptical Organizations.
Currently she is editor-in-chief, website and social content editor for the astronomy magazine Coelum Astronomia.
Patricia Fechet 
Patricia Fechet is a Humanities and Law graduate. For most of her adult life, she’s been concerned about how the population may fall prey to pseudoscientific theories and beliefs. Besides that, she became increasingly worried by the fact that even public institutions at times mislead the people: either because they fall victims to fake news or twisted scientific norms themselves; or because inside the system there are individuals who prioritise their personal beliefs over uncontested scientific knowledge, among whom: biology teachers who deny Darwinian evolution, doctors who fail to inform patients about the benefits of vaccination or advise them against it.
As a means to turn her personal concerns into something productive, in 2013 she joined the Romanian Secular-Humanist Association as a volunteer, then became its vice-president in 2019. She believes that grassroots actions and institutional actions are equally important. Over the years she participated in various projects that popularised science and critical thinking, particularly among the young public (the Science Calendar, Darwin Day, Rationals’ Conference) and coordinated others (Science Days, the Curiosity Summer School). She developed co-operations with public local and regional cultural and educational institutions. In the recent years, she started implementing projects in co-operation with NGOs from other European countries with the goal to educate the youth on the interconnection between science and human rights, and on how individual and collective rights are influenced by scientific discoveries.
Currently, she coordinates the Erasmus+ project „For a better future – Training course for an integrated approach on science and human rights education”, designed for youth workers from Romania, Malta and Bulgaria.
Michael Heap 
Michael is retired and lives in Sheffield, England. For 50 years he worked as a clinical and forensic psychologist, both in the National Health Service and privately, assessing and treating people with mental health problems. He also undertook medico-legal assessments as an expert witness for the civil and criminal justice systems. Latterly, his work at a medium secure hospital was with criminal offenders detained under the Mental Health Act. For several years he held a lectureship appointment at the University of Sheffield.
Michael is one of the co-founders of the UK’s Association for Skeptical Enquiry (established in 1997; see https://www.aske-skeptics.org.uk/), likewise Sheffield Skeptics in the Pub in 2011 (https://www.aske-skeptics.org.uk/sheffield.html). For many years, during Science Week, he gave talks at local schools on science and skepticism and is now a school speaker for Humanists UK. He is also a Humanist volunteer at the multi-faith chaplaincy of Sheffield Hallam University.
Alice Howarth
(info to be added soon)
András Gábor Pintér 
András has been involved in the Hungarian skeptic movement since 1997 and was among those who received James Randi’s Skeptical Award as a high school student at Természet Világa’s student essay competition in 1999. He is among the original members of the Hungarian Skeptic Society (founded in 2006), functioning as a vice president of the
organisation since 2013.
András is a keen speaker who, in his years as an active skeptic, has appeared on TV and radio shows, given talks and held special school classes across Hungary, covering all sorts of different topics related to science and skepticism.
Although trained as a teacher of Biology and Environmental Science, with a short-lived career as a researcher, András has been a tourism professional since 2008, working as a tour director and guide, taking Hungarian groups to close to 20 countries around the world. As a result, his latest interest is in the ways tourism distorts facts and reality.
In 2014, he joined the international group of Wikipedia editors called Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia, led by the American skeptic Susan Gerbic, aiming to improve the online encyclopedia in support of both its own guidelines and the scientific integrity of the contents of the articles.
András was also the initiator and is a co-producer of the weekly show ‘The European Skeptics Podcast (ESP)’ that he co-hosts with Annika Harrison (from Germany) and Pontus Böckman (Sweden) since 2015. The podcast aims to provide a wider international reach of news, issues and local actions in different European countries.
Marianne Rodot
Marianne Rodot is an engineer, with a general engineering degree (mechanics, construction) from HEI-Lille. Retired after over 40 years spent in the industry, with missions as various as building factories, managing quality and technical relationship with suppliers, providing technical support to the customers and training salesforces, managing new product development. She was also an active expert and managed technical committees drafting CEN European and ISO International Standards.
She fought all these years to provide demonstrated and measured facts in order to ensure a safe and correct use of the products, fighting false allegations that could be misleading and deleterous to the users.
This fight for the respect of scientific knowledge and curiosity in all sciences and technologies brought her naturally to AFIS.
She is now managing the international section of AFIS, with a mission to inform about the activities and publications of the other skeptics associations. She was elected to the Administration Board of AFIS in 2024, and was involved in the organisation of ESC2024 in Lyon.
Tim Trachet 
Tim Trachet studied mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy of science. He worked as a journalist for the Belgian public broadcasting organization VRT from 1991 until his retirement in 2023. He made a number of historical television documentaries.
Being interested in astronomy since his youth, he began as a skeptic by criticising astrology, more than 40 years ago. In 1976 he was among the first members of a group for the study of pseudosciences in the Belgian astronomical society VVS. In 1990 the members of the group united their forces with experts from other disciplines and created the skeptical association SKEPP. Tim Trachet became its first chairman (1990-1998).
Living in Brussels, the seat of the European institutions, he felt the necessity of European co-operation among skeptics having made very early good contacts with other skeptical organizations, as he was the only one to attend all of the hitherto (twenty) European Skeptics Congresses. With Cees de Jager and Amardeo Sarma, he proposed the creation of a European Council of Skeptical Organizations in 1995 and has been a member of the board since then.
Tim Trachet wrote numerous articles and some books on various scientific and historical subjects, always with a very critical attitude. Most are written in Dutch. He is co-author of a critical work on astrology (English translation: Making Sense of Astrology, Prometheus Books, 1998). He wrote also a skeptical book in French about the Star of Bethlehem (L’étoile de Bethléem. La lumière guide-t-elle toujours nos pas? – Book-e-Book N°32, 2014) and a book criticising the “survival theories” about Hitler.
Asteroid 7013 is called Trachet for his skeptical contributions.
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