For Youth Rights: steps forward for better protection.

Last week, the European Youth Forum was included in the Council of Europe Social Charter NGO list. This enables NGOs to lodge collective complaints and thus opens a new phase in the work that the European Youth Forum can do in promoting and protecting youth rights.

The European Youth Forum is also now part of the joint drafting group established by the Council of Europe, which aims to develop a Committee of Ministers Recommendation on “Young people’s access to fundamental rights”. On the top of this, the Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner, Nils Muiznieks, recently stressed how much the human rights of young people were affected by the current crisis and he highlighted the need for a rights-based approach, as well as innovative measures in order to tackle this.

In this positive context, six representatives from European Youth Forum member organisations gathered in Helsinki (Finland) for the ad hoc task force on youth rights and anti discrimination promoted by the European Youth Forum in cooperation with Allianssi – Finnish youth cooperation.

The participants focused on two main objectives: planning a new strand of activities relating to legal treatment of youth rights cases, including strategic litigation and collective complaints and they started to identify fields of infringement and possible cases; and shaping a strategy for promoting both the recognition of youth rights and the improvement of the access to these rights. The discussion started with a joint assessment of the recent institutional developments in the Council of Europe and in the United Nations and also covered how the European Youth Forum could advocate more for youth rights within the European Union.

Read more: COE Human Rights Commissioner statement

COE Social Charter collective complaints procedure