Silatech High-Level Event: "Empowering Youth, Transforming Societies"

Statement by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet
 March 4th, 2019
International Conference Centre Geneva (CICG).

Your Royal Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser,
Excellencies,
Colleagues, Friends,

It’s a great privilege to be with you today to focus on this critical issue of empowering young people.  We have a global population today of around 1.8 billion young people – a record number, and growing, particularly in the developing world. Understanding the opportunities and challenges this presents allows us to empower young people and build better societies for all. 

Young people around the world are rising up, fighting for their rights, demanding political reforms and seeking social justice. They are a generation of instinctive defenders of human rights. But in too many cases, their potential is being hindered by violations of their own rights.   

Their rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression are often poorly respected. Many countries are struggling to implement the rights to education and to work – a situation likely to worsen as their youth populations continue to grow. 

Worldwide, young people are three times more likely than adults to be unemployed. Seventy-one million young people are looking for work, many of them hindered by a lack of education and training. The jobs they do find may be precarious and low paid. Globalisation, automation and the wider use of Artificial Intelligence will continue to create challenges as well as opportunities.   

For many young people, even the right to life is under threat.  Many live in situations affected by armed conflict or organized violence, or struggle to access their most basic rights such as food, water, shelter and life-saving health care. 

Friends and colleagues,

These multiple challenges represent an urgent call for action. Empowering young people is the first step towards fulfilling their rights. And one of the most significant routes to empowerment is to include young people in formal decision-making structures.  

Participation enables all human rights to be advanced. It plays a crucial role in the promotion of democracy, the rule of law, social inclusion and economic development. It is essential for reducing inequalities and social conflict. It is one of the core elements of human rights-based approaches aimed at eliminating marginalization and discrimination. It makes for more equal societies and positive social change.

Young people’s passion for political engagement is not currently matched by representation. Their participation in public life is often restricted to consultation exercises. 52% of the world’s population is under 30, yet only two percent of the world’s MPs is under that age.

We need to harness young people’s formidable political engagement and bring it into our political and decision-making processes.  We must enable them to regain trust in formal structures, and remove barriers to meaningful participation, so they are included in the institutions that claim to represent them – not only as rights-holders, but as decision-makers. 

We also need to recognise their key role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, including Goal 16 on the promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies, access to justice for all, and effective, inclusive and accountable institutions at all levels. 

Friends and colleagues, 

I’m delighted that the UN’s recently adopted Strategy on Youth recognizes young people as rights holders, who are key to achieving the Organization´s mission.

I share that vision. Young people are partners for change as well as beneficiaries of that change. They have a pivotal role to play in global issues including peace and security. They must not only be heard but understood, not only engaged but empowered, and not only supporting global efforts, but leading them.  

My Office’s new focus on young people as a “spotlight population” will drive our own engagement on this issue further forward. 

I’m pleased that, with the generous support of Norway, my Office will be establishing youth officers in field offices in Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Senegal, Guatemala and Fiji, to work on youth engagement and the human rights of youth at national, regional and international levels. 

Friends and colleagues,

All these steps will bring us closer to our goal: enabling young people to enjoy their full human rights. It means investing in their rights, developing their potential, engaging with them, bringing them into formal processes and empowering them. 

Across the generations, we can and must build a better world – based on hope, opportunity, freedom and human rights.  The future of all of us depend on our success. 

Thank you.