Charter on Youth and Democracy
The European Committee of the Regions and the European Youth Forum join forces to boost youth participation!
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The Charter on Youth and Democracy puts forward concrete recommendations relating to the democratic participation of young people at three levels of governance: the local and regional level; the national level; and the European level.
The Charter was co-created in a bottom-up process with representatives from youth organisations and young elected local and regional representatives across the EU. It includes 49 recommendations, clustered around four areas:
- Education, cooperation, information
- Youth empowerment, leadership and democratic participation
- Role of new technologies and digitalisation
- Youth mainstreaming of policies and political representation
Stepping up citizenship education, lowering the voting age and supporting young people to stand as candidates in elections, establishing permanent consultation mechanisms with youth, putting new legislation to a youth test, reinforcing EU youth programmes; these are some of the recommendations in the Charter.
About the process:
The European Youth Forum and the Committee of the Regions launched the process to develop a Charter on youth and democracy, at the 9th Summit of Regions and Cities in Marseille in March 2022.
Since then, both partners have organised multiple rounds of co-creation sessions with youth organisations and young people, online and in person, to draft, debate and further refine the recommendations in the Charter. The final workshop on 27 October brought together young participants from all 27 EU member states as well as policy makers from the CoR.
The Presidents of the European Committee of the Regions and the European Youth Forum endorsed the Charter at the CoR plenary on 1 December 2022 in presence of representatives of European Institutions and other key stakeholders.
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