 I am the director of the Youth Prosperity and Security Initiative here at CSIS and we're very glad you can all make it to our rescheduled event. As many of you may know, we originally had scheduled this event for Tuesday, which was Human Rights Day, but as we like to think every day, it should be Human Rights Day. So we in that spirit are glad that we were able to at least carry on with that momentum and have you all here with us today. And we also have a number of folks watching us on the live webcast, so we're glad you're with us as well. The Youth and Human Rights Agenda is an interesting one. I think this is a really timely and important discussion. You often don't even hear that as an agenda, Youth and Human Rights, and yet with half the world's population under the age of 30, it's really sort of driving a lot of the conversations we've been having in the Youth Prosperity and Security Initiative. So we really see today's conversation as a follow-on to some of the dialogue that we've started having, that we've been having over the past year on whether it's youth and human trafficking or thinking about young people and their role as citizens and democracy building and governance, and this is just a natural progression in that conversation. And to kick us off, we are very, very thrilled and pleased to have with us Acting Assistant Secretary Azrazea to give us some opening comments. She has been the Acting Assistant Secretary since March of this year and was previously serving as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in the State Department Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. She's got a very distinguished career over at least 20 years in the Foreign Service, so we're grateful for her service, serving in a number of overseas locales, including Paris and Damascus, Cairo, and of course now here in Washington. So we're going to turn the floor over to the Assistant Secretary, and then we will continue to introduce our very distinguished panel, and we're just very glad I also wanted to mention we're very thrilled to have Special Advisor Zena Rahman here with us today, who is the Director of the Global Youth Issues Office and Secretary Kerry, Special Advisor on Youth, and of course a very good friend to the youth community. So with that, look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thank you all. Thanks so much, Nicole, for that very kind introduction, and it's truly an honor for me to be here at CSIS in this incredibly impressive new building and with such a terrific panel. Great to see some friends in the audience, and also welcome our online viewers as well. I think all of you are quite brave for attending this event on Friday the 13th. So Nicole, on behalf of your former colleagues at the State Department, I want to personally congratulate you, CSIS, and the International Youth Foundation on this groundbreaking first year of the Youth Prosperity and Security Initiative. I think we're all eagerly awaiting the release next year of the Global Youth Well-Being Index, which is really going to fill a critical knowledge gap and I think will help direct more youth-focused policy formulation. But in truth, I'm here today for two reasons. The first one is simple. I'm here to help Nicole reach her goal of attaining 1,000 followers on Twitter. So I've been told she's currently at exactly 930, so for those of you who have your smartphones ready, or if you're following this discussion in the audience, I would refer you to her handle at Nicole Golden. The second reason is a bit more complicated. That is to try to address the topic of today's discussion, youth and human rights. And so if you indulge me, let me begin with a simple realization. In the 65 years since the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was first adopted, each generation has been blessed with iconic human rights leaders who drive change and inspire others to stand up for what's right. For the youth of a certain era, it was the famed nuclear physicist turned dissident, Andrei Sakharov, who captured the world's attention by bearing witness to human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. For students of an ensuing generation, including President Obama, it was the fight against apartheid in South Africa embodied by Nelson Mandela, whose unconquerable spirit prevailed over 27 years of incarceration and led millions of South Africans to claim the equality so long denied them. Even just after Mandela's passing was announced, President Obama stressed, quote, the very first political action, the first thing I ever did that involved an issue or a policy or politics was a protest against apartheid. I shared a similar experience as a college student in the mid-1980s when the divestment movement, inspired by Mandela's courage in the face of injustice, took root at campuses across the nation. For our ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, it was the televised image of a faceless man standing before a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Ambassador Power recently reflected on the impact of that moment in college by saying, it made me think, how did a person so alone simultaneously come to stand for the rights and aspirations of millions? And why are so many people around the world compelled to risk their lives just to obtain the freedoms that most of us here just take for granted? For individuals like today's panelists, Daniel Solomon and his colleagues at Stand, those same questions spurred a decade of young human rights activists to raise awareness of the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. And for today's millennial generation, it's the work of a 16-year-old Pakistani student named Malala Yousafzai, who braved bullets in pursuit of a simple dream, the right of all children, especially girls, to attend school. This summer, the United Nations honored her heroism by declaring July 12th Malala Day. Inspired by her example, more than 500 youth delegates from nearly 90 countries descended upon the UN to advocate for global access to quality education. In each of these examples, a defining person or movement galvanized the hopes and aspirations of millions. In each of these stories, the remarkable courage of one individual inspired a sense of responsibility among many, especially the young. Unburdened by convention and fresh with new ideas, young people will always be at the forefront of societal change. As Secretary Kerry recently told a global audience of young entrepreneurs, every step towards progress actually does start with young people. Nowhere is this more true than in the space of human rights. If history is any guide, it's proven that human rights activism is by no means reserved for the over 40 crowd. In fact, progress in human rights is often fueled by young men and women who reject an unjust status quo. Look no further than here in the United States. In 1831, a 25-year-old named William Lloyd Garrison founded the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, and set in motion a path towards a constitutional end to slavery. More than a century later, a 26-year-old pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Montgomery Bus Boycott and set in motion the dawn of the Civil Rights Era. From Mandela to Malala to the millions of activists who flooded the streets of the Middle East, young people have always played a unique role in the protection and promotion of human rights. This is even more true today, where the proliferation of technology has diminished the space between people. Where a picture on Instagram can document an abuse, a reliable hashtag can mobilize a protest, and a YouTube video can raise the awareness of millions. It was almost two years ago that then-Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, told a town hall in Tunisia that the world ignores youth at its peril. We've since witnessed some tectonic shifts in the region, but our point remains just as relevant, if not more so. If those who grew up during the Depression and World War II were dubbed the greatest generation, then today we're witnesses to the largest generation in the history of humankind. I think most of you are already familiar with the statistics, but they still bear repeating. More than half the world's population is under the age of 30, and nearly 90 percent of them live in developing countries. In Africa and the Arab world, 60 percent of the population is under the age of 30. In ASEAN countries, 60 percent of citizens are under the age of 35. These demographics point to an intriguing dynamic. When it comes to human rights abuses, this generation is literally on the front lines, at once the most visible and the most vulnerable. Put differently, young people are the most likely to stand up against human rights abuses and also the most susceptible to being abused. Allow me to point to three specific challenges and then offer a few thoughts on U.S. government efforts. The first is how to incorporate the priorities of youth into democratic transitions during a time of global youth unemployment and disenfranchisement. According to the International Labor Organization, or the ILO, more youth are poor or unemployed than ever before. The ILO estimates that 73 to 75 million young people between the ages of 15 and 24 are looking for work. About 309 million work but live in households that earn less than the equivalent of $2 a day. The Middle East faces the highest regional average of unemployment among youth at over 28 percent. The dim prospects for success, let alone a stable future, can lead to disenfranchisement. As Aung San Suu Kyi said last year, it's not so much joblessness as hopelessness that threatens our future. Unemployed youth lose confidence in the society that has failed to give them the chance to realize their potential. We all saw the desperate act of one young Tunisian fruit seller that led a country, then a region, to stand up against corruption and repression. When some leaders responded by trampling on the freedoms of association, assembly, and expression, the protests led by students and the unemployed upended the existing order. With change comes opportunity for inclusive economic growth and for new rights respecting legal frameworks that specifically protect youth and allow them to achieve their full potential. But as countries transition from autocratic systems, we also know that youth are more vulnerable to labor exploitation because they're desperate to find work and don't have a voice in society. So we must ensure together that freedom of association and decent conditions of work aren't sidelined as we support democratic transitions still underway. This brings me to issue number two, gender-based violence. This past Tuesday, December 10th, we celebrated Human Rights Day, but we also marked the conclusion of 16 days of activism to end gender violence. Both days remind us of mounting evidence that gender-based violence is a global epidemic that disproportionately affects women and girls. It crosses every social and economic class, ethnicity, race, disability, and education level, and it transcends international borders. We've seen, for example, that an estimated one in three women worldwide has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime, and often this violence is perpetrated against young women or adolescent girls. Gender-based violence is an affront to human dignity. It increases girls' vulnerability, threatens their health, and undermines their full enjoyment of their human rights. So we need to work together to ensure that all girls and boys can live lives free from violence or the threat of violence in order to reach their full potential. And finally, issue number three, the rights of persons with disabilities. There are an estimated 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide. Many of them are young men and women, boys, and girls. All too often, they're stigmatized, relegated to the margins, or treated like second-class citizens. UNESCO estimates that 90% of children with disabilities in developing countries don't attend school. And it's estimated that disabled people, including youth, are three times more likely than their non-disabled peers to be victims of physical and sexual abuse, including rape. These three issues are a small sampling of the cross-cutting human rights challenges that young people face today. I think with enough time, I could have discussed how LGBT youth are especially vulnerable to official and societal violence and discrimination. Or I could have talked about the persistent unlawful recruitment of child soldiers or the shocking prevalence of child marriage for young girls, or the scourge of human trafficking, which I will leave this final issue in the capable hands of my State Department colleague, Alison Kiel Friedman, who is going to discuss this during the panel discussion. But in the remaining minutes, I'd like to address briefly how we in this Department of State and our other US government partners are approaching the issue of youth and human rights. For starters, we view global youth demographics as an exceptional opportunity. The Department's Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review exhorts us to reach out to youth populations to promote growth and stable democratic government. Now, as many of you know, in 2010, the Secretary named a special advisor on global youth issues. And today, we're very fortunate that she's with us here today. Zinat Rahman holds this position. And she's leading department efforts on these issues. Zinat and her staff are working around the clock to address the issue of youth unemployment. They do this by partnering with multilateral institutions, the private sector, and foreign governments to implement solutions surrounding how to address the skills gap. They work with embassies and consulates worldwide and have established some 70 youth councils, which were formed to give young people a voice and an opportunity to address local policy concerns in partnership with American policymakers. We've already seen results in places like Cambodia, where the Youth Council collaborated with the private sector to focus on creating new employment opportunities. My own bureau, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, also promotes the rights of young workers in the workplace. We've worked with the ILO and the G20 to ensure that this issue is addressed as a human rights development and economic challenge and also are seeking to encourage inclusive solutions. Last year, we organized a strategic dialogue with civil society on the margins of the International Labor Conference to hear from young workers and activists how best to tackle the youth unemployment crisis. These ideas have fed into our own foreign assistance budget and informed programs that should boost economic opportunity for all working people, especially youth. We've also begun addressing the challenges of the unregulated informal sector where most young people find work. We believe that moving these jobs into the formal sector is a win, win, win for the workers who gain societal protection, for governments that obtain additional tax revenue, and for businesses that benefit from a more productive and stable workforce. On the issue of gender-based violence, last year the US released the first ever US strategy to prevent and respond to gender-based violence globally. This was accompanied by a presidential executive order directing follow-up by all relevant agencies. DRL recently launched a new public-private partnership called the Gender-Based Violence Emergency Response and Prevention Initiative, which provides short-term emergency assistance to survivors of extreme acts of gender-based violence, including certain harmful traditional practices. In addition, it offers targeted prevention and protection assistance to GBV organizations and technical training to the justice sector. Our ambassador at large for global women's issues, Katherine Russell, is championing our GBV efforts. Working in tandem with her office, we've increased reporting of human rights violations and abuses against women and girls in our annual human rights reports. This includes exploring the issues and the prevalence of female genital mutilation and early enforced marriages. We continue to devote ourselves to combating all aspects of GBV. And on the rights of persons with disabilities, we've galvanized efforts both at home and overseas, led by Secretary Kerry and Judy Heumann, who's the department's first special advisor for international disability rights. We're seeking U.S. ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, also known as the Disabilities Treaty. Ratifying this treaty will put the U.S. in the best possible position to export around the world the U.S. global gold standard in protecting the rights of persons with disabilities, including youth. Ratification will also help us share technical expertise with other countries and help develop laws and practices as effective as ours. Meanwhile, the department's empower program connects disability advocates for more than 20 countries through a series of exchanges aimed at promoting inclusive communities worldwide. We know that such approaches can only be strengthened by our own ratification of the Disabilities Treaty. So again, this is just a sampling of our youth and human rights efforts. We also fund programs such as the Global Nomads Group to provide young people across the Middle East with creative outlets for expression. We provide at-risk youth with peaceful alternatives to violence, and we work with young people to develop the tools for civic engagement. But let me stop there and conclude where I began. It's often said by government officials that young people will determine the future, that they are the leaders of tomorrow. Yes, that's indeed true. But our youth also determine the present. They're the leaders of today, and we should follow their lead. And together, I think we can commit in the immortal words of the Universal Declaration to build a world where all people are born free and equal in rights and dignity. So thank you very much for giving me the opportunity. Well, thank you. We certainly have gotten a lot from this and Secretary to carry on in our conversation with our very distinguished panel, if I'd like to invite to join me up here now. We have Chloe Schrenke, who's the Director of Global Programs with Freedom House and my distinguished former colleague at USAID. And we have Daniel Solomon, the former National Student Director of STAND, which we're going to hear more about, which was mentioned. And of course, last but certainly not least, another former colleague from my time with the State Department, Deputy Director Allison Friedman from the Office to Monitor and Combat Human Trafficking at the Department of State. So I'm going to switch seats here. So the Assistant Secretary uncovered a number of the issues that I'm hoping we can get a little more granular, if you will, with our panel. I often say about young people, whether I think this is true for the human rights agenda or the economic space that young people are often, I think, marginalized by their complexity. And part of that is the enduring question of who are youth? That's something that comes up all the time in the policy space and full disclosure, I'm not a lawyer. So the details of legal norms and conventions may not resonate as strongly with me, and we won't get into them here today, but suffice to say that when it comes to human rights, like many of the other policy issues we've been talking about or trying to elevate in advance here at the Youth Initiative, it's ill-defined. We have a convention on the rights of the child, but as we know, young people, the transition carries on into past that age of majority, if you will, and as I said, are often, complex and are easy to sideline. So with that, I'm hoping that a number of issues and a lot of expertise here on the panel, and I'm gonna start with you, Chloe, and given sort of your perch, both your current perch and former, where do you see the kind of state of young people in terms of their ability to exercise their rights? The Assistant Secretary pointed out how young people are often more susceptible to human rights abuses, and so we'd love your thoughts on where things stand, how are young people situated in the world today to advance their rights, and then we'll go from there. Thanks. Thank you very much, and thank you for inviting me today. I'm really pleased to be here and pleased to have this audience and the audience online as well. This is a challenging question to make generalizations about. There's a lot of cultural implications as to where youth are situated. There are certain societies that are very restrictive on youth voice, that tend to downplay, and in many ways undermine youth voice, diminish the importance of youth. Other societies are more open to that voice. Regardless, one thing youth have for them is energy, they have persistence, they have idealism, they have no shortage of principle and drive. And you know, at Freedom House, we work with human rights defenders, many of whom would be under that rubric, or at least the category that we would call youth. They're powerful. Youth can be really powerful. They're not powerful in any conventional sense. Their power comes from their narrative, it comes from the look in their eyes, it comes from their commitments and their principles, their ability to extend themselves into situations that are downright dangerous at times. And they do it because they care. They care deeply, they're energized by their care. They're willing to draw a line in the sand, a threshold if you will, of human dignity. And they're gonna defend that human dignity. That's why they're called human rights defenders. But they do a lot more than that. Their defense of human rights also, through everything they do, is advocacy for the promotion of human rights. It's a statement that this matters, that this is important, that this is a set of values. And I'm gonna speak much more about values today than law. I wanna get underneath the law in the conventions. I wanna get to where people's hearts are and where their minds are and how they do that reflective work. That's where real attitudes are changed and shaped. That's where possibilities emerge. That's where motivation springs from. That's the place that the human rights defenders that we work with come from and come with to the problems that they're faced with today. What are they met with? Well, they're met with a lot of duplicity. They're met with a lot of rhetoric that doesn't have a whole lot of substance in terms of policy. They're met with language that's positively effusive if you talk about American values and elevation of human rights and on and on and on. And you ask, well, where's the there there? Where's the substance? What does this mean, all this flowery language? How does this translate into how money is spent? How decisions are made? What role young people have in that whole process of decision making? You can guess what the answers are. They're not terribly encouraging. Young people are often actually almost always excluded from any serious decision making. They're left at the margins to shout and they can do that very loudly and they can do it very persistently and they do. But they're not at the center and they're not consulted in many cases around issues that are gonna affect their lives well into the future. They're not asked to share what they feel because what people feel is not allowed in the policy space very much. In fact, I would go so far as to say that our whole dialogue in moral terms is deeply impoverished. We don't know in this town and in many other capitals how to have the moral discussion. We don't know how to reflect ethically on challenges to human dignity. And that's a space that young people want to hear from us. This is the world we are bequeathing to them. And they have good reason to be very disappointed and to ask those questions and to ask us to justify in moral terms because they care. Why? Why is this world the way it is right now? How did you get there? What was your thinking? Because it's gonna be theirs and it's already starting to be theirs. The Assistant Secretary talked about youth as already being leaders. I'm not so sure of that but their voices are strong. They're clearly determined to make a difference and they will. But they're reaching out to us to engage them on substantive issues that are fundamentally moral leaves them wondering what are we so silent about? Why can't we have that talk? What does it mean when we say elevation of human rights? What does it mean for people in government here? I mean just in this room a month ago USAID released their new democracy human rights and governance strategy. Just before it was released and I know this is one of the people who helped write it much of the detail, the grit, the substance of human rights promotion in particular was taken out. I can't tell you why that happened but what we're left with is great rhetoric, very flowery and in some ways very inspirational language but no grit. And young people want that grit. They wanna get stuck in. They wanna know what we have been thinking and what our wisdom, and remember we're supposed to have wisdom, what wisdom are we passing along to them? And we're remarkably silent in that respect. So I think we owe a lot more to young people to youth than we're giving them right now. We owe them explanations, we owe them justification. We owe them some inspiration which we're not giving them that much either. We owe them a lot more than laws and this dismal catalog of human rights abuses that just grows and grows and grows. So I'll stop there for now. Great, thank you. We're gonna come back with some follow-ups but it's a good segue I think into hearing from Daniel who has developed and helped build and lead at a very critical time stand which shows the students against students for action in Northern Darfur, no, I'm mixing up the academic, he will define it. But anyway, one of the most active independent student-led organizations fighting for the end of mass atrocities and just a variety of other human rights abuses and has really helped build that movement and would love to sort of hear not only about the work of Stan but what some of the challenges you see are not only here in the US as an American-based movement but from your work abroad. And then we'll take them there. Hi, so I'd like to thank Nicole for giving me the opportunity to speak about my former work with Stan and some thoughts I had on that experience and this larger conversation about what youth are, what youth rights are and how we can frame that conversation going forward. So briefly about Stan, it's a very small organization that used to be a very large organization. It previously stood for students taking action now Darfur. It was founded in 2004 as the sort of primary vessel for student activism around mobilizing a US foreign policy response to the then and current crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan. So there were a number of student groups who having read about Darfur in the news and having read about the human rights abuses taking place there decided that they had a moral responsibility to mobilize their communities much in the same way as students mobilize their communities against apartheid in South Africa during the 1980s. To say to the US government, we are students who have a particular voice and a particular interest in human rights issues and we demand action. Unfortunately, the organization has shrunk in the sense that people are no longer paying attention to Darfur specifically and mass atrocities more generally and so that as that conversation changes, the nature of how we mobilize and how we activate students at colleges and universities and high schools across the country must also change. So I came on board at a time when the organization was starting to have that conversation about what do we do when the moral dialogue shifts to Chloe's point? How do we respond to the issues that students see as priorities now and how do we channel that voice into something that is politically meaningful? And I think in having that conversation about mass atrocities specifically and then how youth respond to mass atrocities more generally, I came across a couple of sort of findings that I'd like to share with you. One is that the way that we talk about youth is entirely context dependent. So one of the issues that we faced in trying to shape this national conversation around youth organizing or on human rights issues is that we were a national organization that was trying to speak to an international audience. So in 2009, when I joined the organization, you start seeing a lot more conversation across borders through information communication technologies like Twitter and Facebook about mass atrocities and about why mass atrocities are important. And so you start to channel that conversation into your own work on the ground in a national context. So we would try to collaborate with, for example, Congolese groups that were organizing in Kinshasa around the human rights issues that they faced there and we would speak to them as university students trying to figure out how to organize university students in Kinshasa. We were spectacularly unsuccessful and I think learned a lot about our failure in that experience which is that the systems and structures that support youth in the United States don't necessarily support youth in other countries. And I think that that's a finding that has very significant policy implications so that when we talk about enabling youth education abroad, we have to look at what does education mean for youth in Thailand or for youth in Uganda, not just what does education mean in the United States and how can we apply that to a Thai context or a Ugandan context. And similarly, I think we found that the voices that students bring to the, or that youth bring to the table, which I think Chloe described in great detail, are also context dependent. So the issues that students advocate for or that youth advocate for, the sort of moral questions that they view as priorities are entirely different depending on the moral conversation that their society focuses on. So we were having this very active conversation around how do you protect civilians during conflict? And we found that when we would try to have that conversation with a group that was organizing youth on the ground in Burma, the question of what does it mean to be protected was entirely different. We were focusing exclusively on how do you stop people from dying and Burmese youth were also talking about issues of representing themselves in the public sphere. We're talking about economic security. And I think we found that those conversations were ones that we had to grapple with if we wanted our activism to be meaningful. And likewise, I think that's an important sort of policy question that we need to bring to bear is if you talk about human rights issues in an American context and try to place them in a context that's totally different from your own, you have to be willing to allow a give and take as far as those priorities, that voice and what issues actually become important to people. Great. Thank you, Daniel. We're gonna have, I'm sure, a number of interesting follow-up comments and questions to your marks as well. Before we get to those, I wanna give Allison a chance to chime in here with some thoughts. I mean, your current work, obviously, at the department focusing on trafficking, but your other deep vast experience on supply chain issues, some of the labor pieces as well as in youth organizing here in the US. We'll have your thoughts on this point about, at least to start, help us frame some more, this point about interjecting sort of a youth discussion into whether it's a trafficking discussion or a supply chain and labor exploitation discussion. How do we bring those conversations and the very real policy and human issues together in a more explicit way? Thank you. So I think I have the benefit of working on an issue that has as unwieldy a title as youth in trafficking in persons. I think it's not an intuitive term. And when you think about trafficking in drugs or trafficking in weapons, it's really a lot about moving product. And in fact, the legal definition of trafficking, despite what the term suggests, is really the act of holding somebody in compelled service. So when I'm talking about trafficking in persons, just so we all have an understanding, I'm talking about, yes, both the person that was taken against their will to be used in forced prostitution, but also the bonded laborer that's never left their own town. And I think the context here as it relates to youth really fundament and I appreciated Daniel's comments about how context dependent this is does come down to this tension between our fundamental human nature to look for opportunity, to seize opportunity that I think is even more more core in the youth population with a globalized economy and really a dearth of opportunities in many areas in the world. And how that winds up playing out, it can oftentimes be very tragic. And I think when I feel a little bit bad following my State Department colleague with these incredible quotes of Martin Luther King and Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, but when I was thinking about this panel and what I wanted to say, I kept coming back to a tweet I saw recently that said, you know, suggested life hack, be born rich and for a lot of youth in the world, they don't have that choice and they don't have kind of the angel investor to support their big idea, all they have to put up is collateral is themselves. And they have options to travel and take risks in a way that is disproportionate oftentimes to the amount of information that they have about what risks they are actually taking. And I think that, and then within the youth construct, at least when we're dealing with our issue, there is kind of this false dichotomy of agency based on age that comes in in the middle of that, right? So once you turn 18, then you know what you're doing, but under 18, you can't consent. And that winds up playing out, you know, even in the US in terms, in ways that don't advance the policies that I think we would all say we should have towards women caught up in sex trafficking. But it also I think presents a broader challenge to governments and institutions about how we both support the opportunities for entrepreneurship and innovation while still protecting fundamental human rights and get those systems to work in a way that really does honor opportunity as well as human dignity. And I think there are some good examples that we can talk about with the president's executive order on procurement and how that then intersects with the corporate community that I'd love to talk about further. Thank you, Allison. So Chloe, coming back to you for a minute, you talked about, and the Assistant Secretary brought this up as well, just the idea of we owe more to young people. And the Assistant Secretary phrased it in the context of sort of integration. And from your current purge and your former purge and your other hats that you've worn in the past, so we owe young people more, how do we get there? How do we better enable them, empower young people and protect them, whether it's through policy, through training, through programs, what needs to happen to give them what you think, and I agree, young people deserve. I have to think about that for a while. I mean, what they deserve more than any single thing is truth. They don't deserve the duplicity that is handed out to them on a regular basis. They don't deserve the flowery language that doesn't have the substance behind it. They deserve to be talked to as young adults, as this is a world where there's a lot of tough choices, where sometimes human rights priorities will be set aside, whether they should be set aside or not as a whole different and important conversation, but governments will pursue what they determined to be strategic self-interest that is often characterized by very questionable human rights performance. I'm using my words carefully. But the big issue here is how do we discern what questionable means and how do we engage youth in having that conversation? Where are the aughts? Where are the areas that we should be holding government and the older generation? It's not just government, it's the way we live our lives, all of us. We have accountability as well and we deserve to be held accountable to youth. And we deserve to engage with them truthfully to let them know the reasons why we've made the decisions we've made. And few of us are able to do that because few of us have had the invitation, if you will, to reflectively consider the choices we've made. The choices that are having profound impacts on the availability of resources, on global climate change, on issues of access to participation and decision-making that really shapes their future. You know, the language has got to be real. And truth is truth. I mean, of course you can't define what is truth, but you can certainly sense what isn't truth. And you can certainly sense in the same conundrum when human dignity is not being honored. Every society, and I've heard my colleagues on the panel speak a lot about context. And context is of course important, but we are in fact talking about universals as well. And the juxtaposition of universal values of human rights and human dignity may be influenced by context and by culture, but the defense is universal. There's no place where we should really feel reticent about being strong advocates for human rights. No place. If you go to Saudi Arabia, and they tell you if you happen to be female, that you can't drive. You know, one way to respond to that is to get very angry and insulted and outraged. But a much more interesting way is to turn it back on them and say, please explain why half of your population ought to be denied this basic human right to exercise choice, to be able to do something as fundamental as get around, as to move from place to place, and put the moral burden back on them. If we started to do that a lot more, youth would be inspired and motivated to do the same. And that's the kinds of examples that I like to say when we have young activists that come to Freedom House, they have such powerful narratives. They challenge us about the decisions we've made and they challenge us about the decisions we are going to make because the impact of them affects them in their context, but they always bring it back to the baseline. The baseline is universal human rights and even put more basic than that, it's what does human dignity mean? If it's to mean anything at all, we have to be able to speak about it. We have to be able to advocate it for it and we have to be able to justify decisions that we've made and they are asking us to do that. So I think that's the challenge we're facing right now is to answer their question, to speak truth to them and we're not doing it right now. Thanks Chloe, pick up on that. I mean, I think truth can be a very powerful thing, but I do think sometimes young people often need the support. So turning Daniel, whether it's your work or work of partner organizations, colleague organizations, what kind of support do young people need, whether, like I said, whether it's financial support, whether it's policy, systems, you talked about the sort of systems and baseline infrastructures to not only sort of advance their own rights, but to be sort of active and successful human rights defenders. Thanks. So I'll admit I have sort of a mixed response to Chloe's comments, in the sense that I think truth is important and transparency is important, but I've seen a lot of youth colleagues get very agitated over the question of transparency and when an institution becomes transparent, they're sort of stuck as to where to go next. They have information about how X organization operates, but there's no fundamental outcome of justice that comes about as a consequence of an institution being transparent. You have to use that as a vessel, as a jumping off point, for acquiring the kinds of whether it's goods or rights or these sort of fundamental, I guess, deliverables of human dignity. That doesn't just come about as a consequence of transparency. And so I think the question of accessing institutions is an important first step. And that gets us to the point where we can start having these conversations on an even keel so that young people understand that they're brushing up against certain biases and certain interests, but again, that's only a first step. But I think it also can be powerful in the context where there are, there are certain aspects of the status quo that will remain old, that will remain inaccessible to youth. And that's something that I've struggled with as someone who is just out of college and interested in having these conversations in DC abroad, that people 20 years older than I am are having, but that I can't influence in any meaningful way. And so I think there's also an element of the act of participation as something that becomes politically and socially meaningful. That's at sort of a training level. I think the way that I started to think about youth organizing when I was still a youth organizer was my actions as preparing for a certain point in time when I could think about mass atrocities or violent conflict as an issue that I had influence over. But there comes a point when you need that transparency, you need that participation, but the basic nature of the status quo just can't budge. And so I think that's where my mixed perspective comes in is I don't think those are enough, but I'm also not sure there's a way to get to enough that will become meaningful in our political context. And Allison, following up on that sort of similar line of questioning, but one of the points you made which I agree with is again, the unfortunate often vulnerability of young people and part of that is because of often a lack of awareness of rights, whether if rights are learned sometimes in school and they're not in school, I mean for a variety of reasons, young people are more susceptible. So sort of following this sort of line of, you know, again, what needs to happen, doing a lot of programming obviously out of the tip office to better ensure that young people and the sort of specifics of what we know of youth programming of good sort of positive youth development programming are brought into the work that's being done to better support young people in these areas. Good question. I hope I can do it justice. Look, I think kind of bridging the gap. Chloe is right, you know, the defense is universal, but in order for the defense to be effective, it has to accommodate context and we're seeing that a lot around the world now. I mean one of the things that I spent a lot of time worrying about is when I first started working on the modern slavery and human trafficking issues, people would say to me now is the time, right? You know, when in the last generations of abolitionists, you had the church state and major businesses all saying slavery is moral and having tremendous economic interests in perpetuating that peculiar institution and that was the euphemism we used then, trafficking's the one we use now. What I think has shifted in just the last decade is this phenomena of sending and receiving countries and now workforces are not bound by country's borders in a way unlike anything we've ever seen before and there are significant economic interests now that come into recruiting the third country nationals that you rely on for a significant percentage of your country's labor and also that percentage of GDP that is now made up by remittances and I can tell you a disproportional amount of those people are the youth and each country can make an argument that look, that abuse happens during recruitment. It's not our fault that these people arrived with so much debt that they will never be able to earn themselves a freeway home let alone what they were promised or how are we sending country X supposed to be accountable for that exploitation that happens in that country over there long after our citizen has left our shore that's that country's problem and until we start looking at the connectivity and kind of a sharing and figuring out how to start to turn the economic interests that are right now largely based on how to facilitate things quickly to actually promoting those basic human rights in that process we won't be serving youth well. I think when I first started working on this issue I wound up talking to the people who had established the Global Fund to Fight AIDS and I said, this is exactly what we need for trafficking tell me how to do it, tell me how you did it and they said, here's the difference between us and you. Powerful people had loved ones who were dying of AIDS by the very nature of trafficking in persons if you are connected to somebody in power you are only connected to your trafficker. You're not gonna be able to argue for a funding bridge like we were right now and I think what gives me hope is that just as youth are disproportionately affected by this 27 million person scourge they have been able to begin to bridge that gap. We are watching elite college campuses now starting to focus on human trafficking. We are watching elected officials now having to answer you are seeing the White House engage in a way that it never has before with the powerful people in the room committed to this issue and I think that's a long winded way of getting to the short answer, Nicole, to your question which is moving youth issues from kind of the soft, nebulous, oh, aren't young people cute context to how does it connect to our economic, our security and our long-term strategic goals? I think you did, your answer did more justice to my question than the question did so thank you and it's actually a good segue to my last question and I give that also as a heads up to you all to get your questions going in your minds I'm sure there are many and I'm gonna ask the same question sort of to all of you as sort of a final comment before we go to the audience and I suspect we'll have different answers. The Assistant Secretary was kind enough to mention one of our flagship research projects here at the initiative, the Global Youth Well-Being Index which will be coming out in early 2014 and it's sort of a real, we hope, innovative attempt to get a picture of the status and the, if you will, of young people in a variety of different areas, an overall picture and a picture in health and economics and safety and security and certainly rights comes into that and a lot of the conversation so far has been this balance between context and universality. So the measures that we're going to be looking at that we bring into the syndix, the indicators are national level and we quite frankly grappled with how do we bring a human rights measure into this picture of youth wellbeing? So how do we make it, can we be youth specific? It's sort of a way of ending where we started which is what are youth rights? Are they the same as the sort of general human rights? So my question is, how do you think about, how do you measure progress? How can we, in a year from now, look back on this conversation and say we've seen progress in XYZ areas for young people or really among young people because young people are very much doing it themselves so I shouldn't use the word for. So sort of toss that up and we can carry that question forward and if anyone wants to take it first. Chloe, you're nodding so you get to go first. Well, I'll sort of return to where I started earlier on and that is that we need to get under the laws. We need to get to where, what are the things that matter most to the way people live their lives, the opportunities that they're afforded, the ability to shape their own futures. In other words, their ability to exercise human agency, to be their own people. And I think if I can borrow from Amartya Sen, I don't think he'd mind. The UNDP Human Development Report that was done in 2000 is probably the best that speaks to this issue and in that publication, Amartya Sen took all 30 articles of the Universal Declaration and took it down to seven and it provides one of, there's lots of frameworks but it's a framework that I particularly like because it simplifies it, it gets it right to something that is measurable, that is something we can have important conversations about. Some of them are qualitative and some of them are not but he starts with freedoms from and that's an important concept too. In other words, get out of my face. I want to have space to be the human being I mean to be and he includes freedom from discrimination in ways that are constraining you from being who you are. Freedom from want, obviously poverty diminishes everyone's humanity, freedom from fear, many ethicists and philosophers will argue that security and fear are what destroys any other human right without having that all other human rights are meaningless and freedom from injustice which is another sort of backwards way of saying rule of law is important that we really need to have rule of law that works. He has a few freedoms for that are important and are measurable and that's freedoms for the ability to exercise thoughts, speech, freedom of expression, the ability to basically participate which is something young people are denied of frequently. They're told you're too young, come back when you're older. They got their lives ahead of them. There's the freedom for decent work. In other words, that not being exploited like we've heard they have a legitimate expectation to not be taken advantage of particularly when they're in a vulnerable situation which young people often are. And obviously the final one of our sense list is that the freedom to develop, to fulfill their own potential. In other words, society needs to be an instrument to their development. The people need to come first, not the economy. And we get that wrong so often. The other thing is, thinking of that list and thinking about measuring impacts, it's also important to distinguish between the means and the ends. I think Daniel's point was really good when transparency is actually a means to discovering if an institution has the integrity it ought to have. That's the goal, that's the end that we're looking for is integrity. We want them to be legitimate holders of public trust. And the only way we can often get there is to demand a means which is access to information, to be able to see what is going on. So I think these are, we can measure transparency. We can measure access to information. We can measure the degree to which people are able to participate. All of that information is important to have. It's critical to have. It's how we understand trends and emerging situations. But it's not necessarily motivational of change. And I think that's, I'll return back to the place I started. The impoverished moral dialogue we have right now. Change only comes about when we literally persuade people that it can be different. And data will do a tiny bit of that. And it will substantiate that over a longer period perhaps. But if we can't make the pitch, if we can't make the argument in language that really challenges people to be reflective, to think about the decisions they're making and the choices and the inequities, I mean these terrible facts that we live with, the fact that we have enough resources for nobody to die of starvation and malnutrition. And yet every 25 seconds a child dies from that. Why? These are the kinds of questions that data itself won't answer because it comes back to motivation to change. How do we fire that motivation? That's where young people are so important. They've got that fire. They've got that ability to challenge. They've got that ability to hold us and the world. They still think big enough. They're not cynical yet. They're able to say, what is going on? And how can we change it? And that's inspirational to me at my advanced stage to see that this hope hasn't died. This hope is still very much alive. Thanks. I think it's a really interesting question. If only because I sort of view the very term youth rights as kind of a paradox. Because if I think of youth, the sort of general state of being that I think most accurately describes being a youth is someone who is dependent on someone older than them. I think in contrast to Chloe's points that describe youth as this state of optimism, I think there's a dependence that we often take for granted and that needs to be incorporated into the conversation, whether that's dependence on one's parents, on a state institution, on an informal sector, on an orphanage in the context where the parent's question doesn't apply. And so for me, the conversation around youth rights can't possibly be a conversation around human rights. Because the conversation around human rights generally applies to a conversation about freedom. Freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom to speak how you want to and organize how you want to. And so the element of youth rights for me that would be, the most important would be those events at a national level that allow youth to transition from a state of dependence to a state of independence, where youth rights can be human rights, because frankly, they're not now. And so I think finding ways to measure that, whether it's questions of economic justice or meaningful political participation, not necessarily how many meetings the president had with the youth council, but perhaps how many youth members are present in parliament or something along those lines. But I think bridging that youth rights paradox becomes an important way of measuring how well we in the United States are doing at promoting youth rights abroad. So I keep thinking about this marshmallow test. And I'm sure probably a lot of you have heard. But there was this study done as a predictor of success for people, that if you put a four-year-old in front of a marshmallow and said, if you don't eat your marshmallow right now, we'll come back later. And you can have two marshmallows. And the kids who ate the marshmallow wound up being a lot less successful later in life. I chose not to test that out on my four-year-old, because I didn't want to know. But I think it's a good proxy for what we need to be doing as society and what we're not yet. I think too often any human rights are viewed as the things we'll get to later, rather than the things that need to be included now. And Chloe talks about getting under the laws in a much different context than I usually talk about it. When there are entire populations of people that are under the laws in the world, they don't have access to the laws that are written. Forget about whether the laws are good or bad. Those laws don't apply to them. And then you start looking at the systems in which our society functions in contracting, or bids, or how we source, or how we hire. And again, all of those things that I think speak to the society that we want to build, and we're talking about too often, get accounted for after the major decisions are made, rather than as a key component of what business, government, society should look like. And I think we didn't get to talk about it a lot. But one of the benefits of the president's executive order on human trafficking was that contractors wound up having to submit at the time of bid what their hiring policies were and how they were going to monitor them so that that could be factored into the decision-making process. And I think that's critical. And if we can make those investments at the front end, we will have youth human rights marshmallows as much as are needed later on. I certainly can't follow up to the marshmallow test comment. So with that, I'm going to hope that all of our smart people here in the audience can and will. So we've got some mics around. Questions, hands, and we'll go over here. And just remind us who you are. That'd be great. Thank you. Paulina Jeda from the International Foundation for Election Systems. And listening to the various speakers, one thing that came to my mind is just hearing your thoughts and the status of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which I believe the United States has not ratified. Is that correct? And you know it's a law, but how important is it really to pursue that route? Or is it more important to, like you said, go under the bottom and really address the people that it's supposed to affect? So those are just my thoughts as it pertains to youth and human rights. Any thoughts on CRC? I'm sorry, I don't know. You know, the argument that I hear most is that the Convention itself is important, but that we already have domestic laws that do that work and that we really should be evaluated on the legal standards and the performance that we achieve as a society already, which is an invitation for a lot of criticism as well. But it does question our commitment to international norms. And I think that's a more legitimate structure is to say, how important is it for us as Americans to take a stand and to take it very publicly and take it very globally and not say, come here and study our domestic laws and then you'll be satisfied. That to me is not a good enough answer. I think this is an invitation for leadership. And I think we haven't stepped up to the plate yet. Yeah, if I can sort of address that as a tangent, youth rights exclusively are not the issue that I work on. But the issue, I guess, that I do work on is mass atrocities and the most relevant sort of international legal convention. In that context would be the ICC Rome Statute after the genocide convention. I think it's a very similar question. You know, the US, depending on who you ask, you know, is not going to be dragged to the ICC for genocide or crimes against humanity or war crimes. But it is an issue on which we publicly speak and it is an issue that we've committed ourselves to. And you know, I think to its credit, the Obama administration has done a lot, like it's done a lot on youth rights to address international criminal legal gaps in the absence of actually seeking the ratification of the Rome Statute. But it always stops short. You know, someone is always going to say, but you haven't signed the Rome Statute before, but you haven't signed the convention on the rights of the child. And you know, I recognize it's sort of a tenuous political question in both contexts. But I think it's an important one if we want to see ourselves as up to date with these conversations that are taking place around human rights issues. And just to add to that and to go back to something I mentioned at the beginning, which is I think this speaks to this broader question that I don't think there is an answer to, which is again, sort of what are quote, youth rights versus child rights versus the universal declaration, right? Because even the legal definition of children at 18, yet we certainly know that the, by most common discussion and convention, the sort of youth transition, right? To that adulthood, to that independence, carries on for several years. So then what, you know, what is the sort of youth rights agenda that needs or could even be codified, if you will, in that convention? I think we have time for a couple more. Hi, thank you very much. This has been a great panel. My name is Agus Galmarini and I'm with Search for Common Ground. And I have a question around making the case for youth investments and youth issues. And Chloe, you mentioned the importance of being able to make the pitch. And Alice, then you also mentioned how sometimes certain economic arguments may or may not work against your favor when you're talking about trafficking in persons. Recently I was working on a document and I was trying to find a really catching statistic, something really great to show, you know, what youth investments can lead to, what positive contributions youth have to society, apart from all of the things that we innately know to be true around rights and the value of young people. I really wanted to find something concrete, a number of statistic or something. And I'm not a youth expert by any means. And I spent a good amount Googling this question and I kept coming up with nothing actually. I looked through a lot of youth policies and there was a lot of really great language, but there was really like a lack of substance. And I'm just wondering, how can we make that case for different audiences? How can we make the economic case better? How can we make kind of the argument for investing in youth be applicable to people outside of this field who care so much about, you know, human rights and dignity? In some cases where those arguments don't carry us as far as we would like. And what's really needed to be able to do that? And what recommendations do you have? Stay tuned for our index, but I'll let the panel... This won't be a totally helpful answer, but I do empathize with you. When we first started working with the White House on the president's executive order, it was kicked off by anecdotal reports that we were hearing of people being promised incredible jobs in Dubai, showing up in Istanbul, being told those jobs no longer exist. So up to you, you can go to Iraq and Afghanistan supporting troop movements, or you can be sent back home, but oh, by the way, you owe us all the money you took out for your loan to go back there, which of course, they had taken out a loan so they didn't have that money. And really, the U.S. government, at that point, has nothing to do with these people, but we are creating the demand at the end that unscrupulous labor recruiters are seeking to fill. And so as we started looking at what meaningful contracting reforms would look like, there was concern, an understandable and appropriate concern, that we needed to make sure that anything that we suggested could actually be implemented in a way that wouldn't ruin the economy around it. And so there was a request to go out and talk to corporations who had implemented similar protections and have them make the business case for why it made sense. And almost to a business, they would say, and kind of the consultants that were working with them would say, look, we wound up going into it for whatever reason we went into it, but what we have found is in doing this the right way has meant that we have more qualified people. Whatever the product is, we're able to deliver it on time and the quality has improved significantly and we've wound up with a more streamlined supply chain because in order to profit off of kind of trafficking and labor exploitation, you need to then have graft in the system, dupe people that are less qualified for their jobs and all the rest of it and they would lay out better than I've laid out for you all of the business reasons that this made sense, all of the hard reasons and we'd say, great, can we get a quote or some statistics on that to pass forward and invariably what they would say was, oh, we're doing this because it's the right thing. We don't wanna put our company on the hook for saying we're fighting slavery in our supply chain because it makes better business sense and I think that winds up carrying over to a lot of the human rights issues and once you start addressing human rights or youth rights, it's very counter-intuitive for the people on the front lines to say we're doing this because of dollars and cents or the other statistics that you're kind of looking for and I think it works as a disincentive. I'll just quickly add on to that. I mean, I think, again, going back to some of the challenges in this kind of space in particular, in this space, I mean, human rights, but even thinking broadly around civic, political, participation, and expression, it's probably been one of, I think, the hardest to measure, to quantify into a statistic that can show progress and make that case. The economic side is a lot easier, quite frankly. You can look at some of the statistics, some of the research and the evidence that's come out of, for example, in East Asia where arguably as much as a third many economists say of that quote demographic dividend that East Asian miracle was attributed to having a being at that population transition where they had a large, youthful workforce that was invested in, therefore with education and skills training was therefore more productive and contributed to national growth. That's a much sort of clearer case that can be made. And here I think it's harder, I think we can say that societies are more peaceful, democratic consolidation happens, is stronger when all members of society, including where there is a large youth population or a small one, feel that they have a stake in the game, feel that they are respected and valued and protected by their government and their society, but it is, it's a harder case and it's something that we're thinking a lot about and I know everyone else is as well. Probably time for one more question. Our colleague right there. Well, thank you so much for this thought provoking conversation. I'm Amira Woods with Institute for Policy Studies. Happy to be here. And I guess I wanted to answer your question in a little bit of a different way because I just, you know, because I spent so much time obsessing as Daniel knows about Africa and US Africa policy from Liberia and all of that. You know, Senegal for me is the answer and I hope it comes out in your index. But you know, Senegal, it's essentially young people that reclaim democracy, you know, took back the reins of power from a government that wanted to, well did, you know, changed the constitution to run for a third term and a hip hop group essentially said, we don't think so and started organizing, right? So, and you know, clearly in the acting assistant secretary mentioned Tunisia and that's amazing, right? But in the last three years since Tunisia, 22 African countries have had similar uprisings led by young people. So I just think when we think about why the investment in young people, well, it's because it's dynamic. It's using art and culture and poetry and music and all kinds of creative forms of touching people's hearts. I just love all your moral and ethical language. I thank you for that, I'm carrying it with me from here. But I think, you know, that's the why and the ripple effects are huge. So I guess I just, I wanted to bring some of that in because I think for me it's what gives me hope and yeah, we've been going through all this Mandala stuff so I'm huge on inspiration and hope this week but I just think that there's so much just as we don't know where the occupied Wall Street and occupied DC folks are ending up there everywhere and finding ways to express their activism. I think also these movements on the Africa side are finding tremendous space for their agency. They're using the technology in new and creative ways. So why invest? I think the outcomes of dividends are going to be tremendous for the 21st century and beyond but I just thank you for the thoughtful comments and remarks and yeah, I look forward to your index. Great, well I think that that's a hopeful note to end on so just want to thank you all for being here and hopefully you'll all join me in a round of thanks for a very distinguished and candid panel. And this is a conversation that we hope to continue to have here at CSIS and we hope to see you all again with us soon. Thank you, enjoy your weekend. Thank you.