A youth’s vision of the future – The Bali Declaration: outcome document of the Global Youth Forum

The Global Youth Forum brought together hundreds of youth, civil society and member states, among others (in addition to the 2,400+ virtual youth delegates), to identify and discuss issues and priorities facing today and tomorrow’s generation of young people within the context of population and development. IFMSA was present there with the delegation of 4 people (Joško Miše, LO SCORA, Anna Rasmussen, Marija Delaš and Johanne Iversen).

The overall goal of the Forum was to “produce recommended actions for the outcome report of the [ICPD +20] review and for the post 2015 United Nations development agenda as well as to generate a new consensus on putting youth rights at the heart of development.”

Prior to the event, five priority themes were identified which laid the foundation for discussions throughout the 3-day Forum. The five themes included: Staying healthy, Comprehensive education, Families, youth-rights and well-being, including sexuality, Transition to decent work and Leadership and meaningful participation.

The recommendations contained within the final Bali Declaration provide youth advocates with concrete tools through which they can advance for a progressive rights-based agenda both within the remaining spaces of the ICPD+20 review process and the shaping of the post-2015 development agenda. The Bali Declaration is a powerful document through which we can strongly influence the decision makers to put young people at the center of shaping the future we want. The importance of the Bali Declaration lays also in the fact that it addresses issues that Rio+20 outcome document failed to mention – mentioning reproductive rights in the text and linking SRHR with development issues.

Some highlights from the Final Declaration include:

-          Governments address harmful traditional practices (such as forced circumcision and genital mutilation, early and forced marriage, gender-based violence and violence against women).

-          To produce non-discriminatory, non-judgemental, rights-based, age appropriate, gender-sensitive health education including youth-friendly, evidence-based comprehensive sexuality education that is context specific.

-          Governments must provide, monitor and evaluate universal access to a basic package of youth-friendly health services (including mental healthcare and sexual and reproductive health services) that are high quality, integrated, equitable, comprehensive, affordable, needs and rights based, accessible, acceptable, confidential and free of stigma and discrimination for all young people.

-          As part of this basic package governments must provide comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services that include safe and legal abortion, maternity care, contraception, HIV and STI prevention, care, treatment and counselling to all young people.

-   Governments and international organizations are urged to undertake political reform to include young people in policy-making and implementation, regardless of socio-economic and cultural background, in line with international human rights standards, and should remove legal, policy and regulatory barriers that hinder the meaningful participation and empowerment of young people to exercise and claim their rights.

 

Joško Miše

Liaison Officer for Reproductive Health issues including AIDS

Global Youth Forum: powerful outcome document, unlcear follow up, transparency issues or what does Timbaland have to do with a UN meeting?

About the importance of the Global Youth Forum and the significance of the Bali Declaration that sets the framework for the powerful advocacy in shaping the post-2015 development agenda you could read in previous blog posts. And I suggest you do read those ones before commencing reading the concerns that showed up along the way.

Even though we ended up with a progressive outcome document, it is hard to be fully satisfied with the Forum, which puts UNFPA, as an organiser of the event, as well as the youth NGOs that were part of the Steering Committee, under the spotlight of a hideous tokenistic approach and a questionable agenda.

Firstly, the organisation of the arrival of the youth delegates was extremely poor. The applications to attend the Forum closed on 5th of September, but it was not until late October/early November that we received an information whether we were accepted to the Forum or not. Since the Forum was sponsored and organised by UNFPA, they were covering all the travel expenses of all the delegates including our accommodation and per diems. And apparently, when UN pays, then it is not that they just pay, they splurge. Almost all the delegates’ airplane tickets were purchased in the last week prior to the start of the Forum. I am a proof of that as I was very concerned about my attendance of the Forum since I received my e-ticket 3 days before the departure, costing 1800Euros! One of the delegates from Iceland concerned about this actually made a phone call to ask how much money they are entitled to spend on purchasing airplane tickets. They can spend up to 6400Euros. Multiply only half of that amount with approximately 800 people that were there and you get quite an impressive sum. Add to that the fact that these types of meetings happen every few weeks, and you will get a big question mark over your head because they can easily be avoided with simple and basic organizational skills.

But the question marks don’t stop there. On the last day of the Forum, a final text of the Bali Declaration was meant to be presented. It was supposed to be a grand finale where we would discuss the outcome, greet the Declaration, put stress on the upcoming steps, and make clear to everyone the importance of follow up. But since we were a bit late in the agenda, that whole part was skipped! We were simply told – the Declaration will be made available online in few days and we were all sent to the third floor of the Convention Centre where there was a big concert planned. A concert featuring a big Indonesian superstar, who used this event to promote her new song to the “global audience”, two Swedish DJs and Timbaland. Yes, Timbaland, a singer, song writer, producer from the US.  A one big room of the Convention Centre was turned into a real dance club with sound system and light show that even the biggest clubs would be ashamed of (pics below).  What is even sadder of the fact that we had to skip such an important part of the closing of the Forum due to the concert was that very few people raised eye brows and asked themselves: Did UN really pay for all this? They didn’t fly in Timbaland from US and two DJs from Sweden, did they? Was it MDGs that we were talking about? Did we hear that they were more money cuts announced for the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria that will leave more millions of people without antiretroviral treatment? Maybe we did, but now it probably got lost in the dance sound…..

And when you think that youth NGOs would provide a somewhat different story, a cold shower there as well. From the very beginning it was difficult to understand how the members of the Steering Committee were selected, how the selection of the facilitators was made, who was drafting the Declaration. When you asked someone, they usually said that it was made through a mailing server. Which one out of the dozens that exist? Who has the ownership and mandate to create such mailing servers? And the most important question (the one I have been asking myself and others for a while) – how to get on those mailing servers? Obviously, by knowing the right people.  It was also surprising to see that there was a meeting of twenty youth delegates with the member of the High Level Task Force of ICPD, a Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs. The meeting wasn’t a surprise but the fact that it was considered as a top secret was! There was an e-mail floating around seeking for participants, some delegates got selected a night before during the dinner. When I confronted a girl from one NGO who was in charge of organising it, asking about the selection process and selection criteria and why the meeting was not open to everyone – she answered “yes, you are right. It was not transparent, but…..”. It is very hard for people to understand how serious impact handling things in a non-transparent manner could have. On one hand, it is irrespective of hundreds of other delegates who were welcomed in Bali with a message that each and every one of us had equal chance in shaping the process, recommendations and outcomes to know that twenty delegates, selected in a non-transparent way, made their own recommendations to the member of the UNFPA High-Level Task Force. And the same can go in other direction – how will the Dutch Minister, a member of the High-Level Task Force, be able to take the recommendations from that meeting  seriously, if she knows the selection was made in a questionable manner, with delegates who were not given a mandate to speak on behalf of hundreds of delegates?

The above raised concern, how maybe frustrating and appalling they are, shouldn’t diminish the significance of the Bali Declaration – a document that leaves us, youth advocates, with a powerful tool to fight for the rights of young people to be taken seriously in shaping the post 2015 development agenda, especially after Rio failed to do so.

Joško Miše

Liaison Officer for Reproductive Health issues including AIDS

Worlds AIDS Day at COP18 in Doha, Qatar

Dear IFMSA Family,

World AIDS day was on this past Saturday December 1st and we were more than happy to spread awareness about HIV/AIDS at COP18 this year. We had completed an action, which was targeting the impacts that discrimination has on HIV positive individuals. Some of the particular discrimination’s that were addressed within our action pertained to being denied human rights and services, such as: access to housing, service at commercial retailers, expulsion from educational institutions, termination or refusal of employment, consensual sex between men, poor treatment in healthcare settings, access to facilities, lack of confidentiality in healthcare settings, medicine in resource-poor areas with limited or no drugs, social isolation and ridicule, restrictions on travel, stay and deportation.

 

We had participants from Medsin UK, Healthy Planet UK, South African Youth Climate Collation and YOUNGO to help deliver our action and we are extremely happy that other organizations came out to support our message. Additionally, we got support from other organizations we as a delegation feel as though our message of discrimination against HIV/AIDS was effectively and clearly delivered. For a brief overview, our skit included one HIV positive person, that was actually played by myself and then there was a chain formed of the different forms of “discriminators” by holding hands. The discriminators also had had their backs faced to the HIV positive individual to further indicate and portray the discrimination that HIV positive individuals face with society. Either the viewers or our supporters tried to break the chain of discrimination and free the HIV positive individual from the discrimination. Moreover, as we presented our action, many viewers stopped to take photos and make videos of our action.

Not only was it world AIDS day this past Saturday but it was also a monumental day in Doha seeing that it was the first civil environmental march. Approximately 800 hundred civilians took the streets of Doha that morning. Within the 800 marchers there were about 100 young activists from the Arab youth climate movement that were calling the Arab leaders to take a lead in the negotiations. The initiation of this movement was a collective collaboration between several different organizations such as: 350.org, Climate Action Network, IndyAct, and the Global Climate Change.

In the evening there was an NGO party, which was hosted at a hotel resort. The hotel had a beachfront and that they were able to stand in the water, which was surprisingly quite warm, seeing that in the nights Doha has a chilly breeze. There were also camels at the party that were available to the guest if they wanted to take a ride! The party was a fantastic way to not only end but also to have a relaxing evening to end the eventful and exhausting first week of COP.

Overall the first week was successfully on many levels and we as a delegation are excited to have another productive and exciting week of COP.

Signing off from Doha and wishing the IFMSA family well,

Tanya Kondolay on behalf of the COP18 delegation.