Address by Ms. Kate Gilmore, United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights at the Panel on Youth and Human Rights

33th session of the Human Rights Council
Geneva, 22 September 2016
Salle XX, Palais des Nations

Mr President, Excellencies, Distinguished Delegates, colleagues, friends

It is a privilege to join this panel, particularly alongside those representing youth movements from around the world.

Today’s demographic realities - and the pace of global change - for better and for worse – combine to make of young people the generation of our time.  That other SDG if you like – the Sustainable Development Generation.

1.8 billion young people worldwide, the most the world has ever seen, means there can be no sustainable development without them and no sustained development if not for them.  The numbers dictate that factually; our obligations to them dictate that morally; and their rights ground us necessarily in their realities.

For, today, worldwide, young people are three times more likely to be unemployed, meaning 73 million young people are looking for but not finding work.

When they do find work, they labour in far more precarious conditions than adults do, and in absence of equal pay for equal work.

27 million young people are migrants – far from their homes, travelling sometimes unaccompanied often precariously, in flight from a life they believe they cannot sustain in search of a life with security, improved standards of living, greater opportunities for education and employment, freedom from gender, race and other forms of discrimination and abuse – searching - in other words – for freedom to exercise their human rights.

Young people under 30 constitute 43% of all homicide victims.

Sexual violence disproportionately affects young women and girls complications in pregnancy and childbirth are the second leading killers of adolescent girls in developing countries – depite being largely preventable.  Every year at least 3 million girls aged 15 to 19 undergo unsafe abortions. 

Globally, adolescents are the only age group from whom deaths due to AIDS have increased – an increase of about 50%, in the course of the MDGs in contrast with a 32% decrease among all other age groups during the same period.

And we must be very clear what this means on a global scale.  For globally, relative poverty and lack of opportunity is young, young, young.  The median age of Niger is 15.  South Sudan - 17.  Of Yemen and of Nigeria - 18?  The demography of relative privilege?  It is so much older and ageing - the median age of Demark is 41, Austria is 44, Germany 46. 

Mr President, our world cries out for better and more inclusive engagement with the largest generation of potential - for energy, creativity, passion and talent – to which we have ever had access, and yet, around the world only 1.65% of parliamentarians are in their 20s.  In fact the average age of parliamentarians globally is 53. 

Frankly, the report card of our engagement with young people makes for grim reading.  This most interconnected, most educated, healthiest generation is also the generation at gravest risk of being left far, far behind.  Yet as the economic and social histories of countries that leap-frogged up the development curve post WW2 prove, investing in young people – reaping the demographic dividend of young populations – is to the benefit of all.

Yes, the needs of the world’s adolescents and young people are significant: for schooling and higher education; life skills and vocational training; for meaningful employment; safe homes; for protection from violence, from exploitation, from exclusion and for evolving personal autonomy in decision-making about their own sexual and reproductive health. 

However, underpinning these needs and central to assignment of responsibility for the meeting of their needs – are their rights.  After all:

·    Violations of their rights are the gravest threats to young people’s and adolescents’ well being - violations of right of young women to be protected from early and forced marriage; of young people’s rights to live free from sexual violence; to live free from discrimination on the basis of their age, disability, ethnicity or gender identity.
·    Denial of their rights further exacerbates vulnerability and entrenches inequality – Denial, for example, of their rights of access to the commodities, information and thus choices that would mean they could more readily avoid and delay pregnancies, could more ably protect themselves from STIs, could more knowledgably negotiate safe and consensual sex.
·    Violation and denial of their rights derails other rights – such as their rights to education, to livelihoods, to employment, to political participation.

Yes, development – inclusive and sustainable – should be focused on their needs but it must also uphold their rights.  We must:

-     Institutionalize robust civic registration including of births, marriages and causes of death as these are the building blocks of legal personhood;
-     Remove laws and tackle cultural norms that impede young people’s access to information, services, contraceptive commodities and thus choices;
-     End child marriage – in law and in practice;
-     Give boys and girls unfettered access to comprehensive sexuality education;
-     Provide adolescents and young people integrated community based health services that welcome them rather than stigmatise them.
And most critically,
-     Keep adolescents in school – pregnant, married or unmarried;
-     If they are out of school – keep them in education – such as life skills education;
-     If they are out of education – build opportunities for them to keep learning and to bridge them back into learning.

Excellencies,
We must also recognize however, that the deepest challenge lies not with young people:

"We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self control."

So wrote, on the wall of an Egyptian tomb, one adult more than 6000 years ago.  Throughout time, adult discomfort it seems – our amnesia

– has served to entrench rather than alleviate much of the human suffering that young women and men people undergo.  Our prudish denial of their emergent sexuality clouds and distorts our engagement with the landmark human development phase of adolescence during which a person become themselves – during which we too became ourselves –, talented, gendered, sexual, personalized, individualized.

And even more perversely, it is adult behaviour – in the form of adult exploitation and abuse of that same emerging sexual identity - that lurks behind much of child marriage, of child sexual abuse and of human trafficking.

Double standards further impede the dignity of young people: Young people are deemed not old enough to drive, yet are old enough to be a parent?  Not old enough to vote, yet old enough to be married? Old enough to be pregnant, but not old enough to be trusted with access to sexuality education or information or to contraceptives?  Old enough to catch a STI but not old enough to seek and receive treatment for it?

A child’s safe passage from birth to adulthood – is not the child’s responsibility – it is ours.  In this the challenges we must face up to perhaps have less to do with young people’s behaviour and much more to do with adults’ – with the behaviour of parents, families, schools, communities, governments and international actors.  Paving the way from childhood to adulthood with rights upheld, protected and respected is our obligation to them.  Sharing political, economic and social space, assets and opportunities with them is also just essential.  And building stable platforms for ongoing intergenerational dialogue must be made an urgent priority.  And it should not be young people who are providing the strongest leadership and issuing the clearest calls in this respect.  But they are.  And they remind us too that they want, need and have the right to the assets, space, support and freedom to make informed decisions about their bodies, their opportunities and our shared futures. 

Thank you.