Tackling discrimination at YO!Fest

During the YO!Fest at the European Youth Event, the European Youth Forum, in cooperation with Amnesty International, IGLYO and Social Platform, organised a roundtable on multiple discrimination and young people to help raise awareness of this issue.

The roundtable proved popular with around 150 people attending. It was opened by the presentation of the main findings of the survey on youth and multiple discrimination that the Youth Forum currently conducting.

Ska Keller, Green candidate for the Presidency of the European Commission, gave her views on the topic: from a very personal point of view, she mentioned that these days youth is not recognised as a valid interlocutor in politics. She also re-launched the idea of a strong institutional initiative able to tackle discrimination as a whole.

On the panel itself were young activists and representatives from organisations active in the field: Kusha Bahrami, from Amnesty international Greece, Zara Todd, from The European Network on Independent Living) and Peter Emil Nielsen, from Sabaah.

Each contribution showed in a different way how serious, frequent and varied discrimination against young people can be: Zara spoke about youth, gender and disabilities and how they intersect, Kusha discussed hate crime and violence affecting young migrants and refugees and Peter talked about LGBTQ youth with a migrant background as victims of racism and discrimination.

After the panel there was a very interactive session of questions and answers, enriched by contributions from some of the Youth Forum’s NGO partners: Social Platform, Amnesty international, IGLYO.

During the debate there was some discussion around possible strategies to tackle multiple discrimination, these included:

• putting people at the centre, using an holistic approach and addressing the multifaceted identities and intersectionality of discrimination
• empowering people, increasing awareness of their rights and improving the assistance to eventual victims
• embedding the fight against discrimination into the fight against social exclusion as a whole
• present in public and through the media the real faces and stories able to break the barriers of ignorance and prejudice. More efforts at local level to involve victims and to build their confidence, but also informal initiatives to spread the debate, are needed.
• compiling and simplifying human rights education tools
• A strategic alliance among those working in the field is needed

See the European Youth Forum’s survey on multi-discrimination: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DL7MQ6G