Thursday, 7th October 2010

The State of Youth Rights in Europe
A personal account of the YFJ meeting in Strasbourg

The event took place from 6-7 October 2010 in Strasbourg and was organised by YFJ with the aim of preparing input to the report on the motion for a Convention on Youth Rights.

A total of 20 participants (11 representatives of MOs, 3 representatives of the Advisory Council of the Council of Europe (AC), 2 YFJ Board members, 2 guests and of course Sara as CoE coordinator from the YFJ Secretariat).

For myself and for JEF on whose behalf I was sent to Strasbourg it was important to be present in order to gain more insider knowledge and information on what has been done so far in the field, where the discussions are at internally within the YFJ and externally in terms of advocacy and lobbying in the CoE framework.

In the first part we heard two valuable contributions regarding youth rights in Europe and Latin America. Our colleague Mourad Mahidi (OJV) has namely just successfully defended his Master Thesis "The Young and the Rightless - the Protection of Youth Rights in Europe", the first such academic research on the topic in Europe. We can be grateful to have a real expert among our own members and his conclusions helped us better understand the situation as well as come up with evidence-based (legal) arguments in favour of youth rights.
The second valuable contribution was by Trinidad Garcia from the Ibero-American Youth Organisation (OIJ) who presented their experience with achieving and implementing the Ibero-American Convention on Youth Rights. She reminded us of the lengthy process that accompanies such an undertaking and that in their case it was a top-down approach with the initiative to have such a document coming from the states. In our case its rather the opposite.

The most important thing for me in this meeting is the broad agreement on the need for more debate within our platform between those that have been involved in this issue in the recent past and the rest. It was also important that regardless of previous reservations all participants present managed to agree that we can agree on supporting the fight for youth rights as long as:

1) youth rights are understood as "adding and enhancing the rights of young people" that are currently covered by the European Convention on Human Rights, the European Social Charter and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; this means fighting for rights that will correspond to meeting the actual needs of youth as a special age group (e.g. right to autonomy, right to full and effective participation etc);
2) we continue a broad and open discussion on the issue of youth rights within the YFJ by informing and involving everyone before being able to decide on the next steps both in terms of content as well as strategy;
3) we ask for the maximum legally-binding document to achieve such rights.

In the second part of the meeting we exchanged views with Ms Elvira Kovács, a member of the Committee on Education within the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), who is rapporteur for the issue of youth rights in this framework. Moreover, we prepared the input for the meeting of this Committee and come up with a list of arguments in favour of youth rights. These arguments should also serve as a basis of further discussions among the YFJ members prior and during the General Assembly in Kyiv. 

The final act was the actual participation in the Committee meeting of PACE. Welcoming the fact that youth representatives had the chance to participate for the first time I was disgusted by the Chair of the Committee on Education of PACE telling youth representatives when cutting their speaking time and not allowing the diversity of four speakers: "we have urgent business to do (undertone being you are not urgent/important) & life is brutal". It was a shameful moment and we can only hope that the new Chair of this Committee Mr Flego from Croatia will improve in his dealing with youth. 

It was exactly these kind of moments and incidents that are symptomatic in the dealing with young people: we don't want to be considered as inexperienced bearers of future but as opinionated actors of the society of here and now. And the fight for the right to full and effective participation in political and social life and decision-making processes is a much needed and worthy cause to fight for. But to fight such a fight we need to stand united and that can only happen if we have everyone pulling on the same end of the rope, which in turn can only happen if everyone was given the chance to voice their opinions on the issue in an open and transparent manner and then take a final decision in due time that will stay binding not only for a year or two but for the entire lengthy process of this struggle for youth rights.

Having had individual and usually disconnected events on the issue of youth rights in the past is not a sufficient way of bringing the issue into the core of our future work. We need an action plan and clarifying debate on what we want, why we want it and how we plan to achieve it.