Facilitating the World Conference on Youth

This week I received some very exciting news - in under a month (23 days according to the countdown on the website homepage) I will be travelling to Sri Lanka to act as a facilitator at the World Conference on Youth 2014. This event, running from the 5th - 10th May in Colombo, will be focusing on the role youth can play in, and ensuring youth issues are reflected in, the international development agenda that will come into effect in 2015 after the completion date of the Millennium Development Goals.

I have yet to find out which 'Themes' or 'Foundations' I will be facilitating on, but my preference definitely includes the 'Gender Equality' track. As with most UN events, it is incredibly difficult to go from a blank page to an outcome document in under a week (and nearer to four days!) and so a 'Zero Draft' of the outcome document has already been released for comment. This document has 70 paragraphs based on text and wording previously agreed at other UN events. You can download this document and feedback your own views on it here.

Global Youth Forum, Bali, 2012. I hope the outcomes from Sri Lanka will be as progressive.

The Zero Draft

This morning I sat down with the Zero Draft and started to note what I would like to change to make it more progressive and ambitious. If the outcome document only contains statements that have already been agreed to elsewhere within the UN, we can rightly say this conference will have been a waste of time and a copy/paste exercise. the text at the moment has a few paragraphs that I will whole-heartedly champion (e.g. ending violence against women and girls) however I want to push these even further - lets end all gender based violence including that based on sexual orientation and minority gender identities. What I am hoping for is some progressive new language that would further the rights, inclusion and development of young people beyond what has been agreed to before!

 Regular blog readers may remember my trip to the Global Youth Forum in December 2012 - a youth focused event hosted by the UN Population Fund as part of their ongoing 20 year review of the International Conference on Population and Development. That outcome document, The Bali Youth Declaration contained a lot of progressive language on topics such as SRHR (Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights) and supporting marginalized populations (including minority sexualities and gender identities). However, its downfall is that it was essentially a consultation document going forward - the forum was a lot more youth and a lot less governments, meaning we were making really strong recommendations, but that governments are not obliged to listen to the ones that don't fit with their priorities. The action as a result of that event came from the youth constituencies, those who used it as a document to aid the lobbying in a wide variety of national and international political processes.

The World Conference on Youth 2014 will be attended by just as many young people but, if my understanding is correct, there will also be representives of a large number of governments and UN agencies. The zero draft contains a paragraph calling on the Secretary General to refer to this document in ongoing Post-2015 Agenda negotiations and reports and also for the UN General Assembly (the body which every government is part of) to recognise the outcome document of the conference as a 'critical contribution' to the Post-2015 debate. It is this potential influence and recognition which will make the World Conference on Youth's outcome document more important and influential, but at the same time it's these same factors that may make it more difficult to make it progressive.

The 'I'm thinking how to edit this UN language' face.

My Edits

Having gone through the document this morning I have tried to achieve three things:

• Ensure the needs of those with minority gender identities and diverse sexual orientations are recognised - especially under gender equality paragraphs.
• Strengthen and include more rights based language - especially relating to sexual and reproductive rights. 
• Make it grammatically correct. This may be the pedant in me, but if it doesn't read write then what it legally means is even more up for debate!

I have only made a brief starton improving these areas so far and, whilst I hate to reiterate merely what has come before, I will need to show the precedent for the phrases and insertions I have made before I submit my feedback later this week.

What issues do you want to see included in the outcome document? Let me know and I will try and include them with my feedback.