 Well good good afternoon everyone thank you for joining our event I'm Nicole Golden 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 this we originally had scheduled this event for Tuesday which was Human Rights Day but as we like to think every day 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 are 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 Ezra Zeya 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 in the Foreign Service so we're great 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 gonna 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 also wanted to mention we're very thrilled to have Special Advisor Zina Rahman here with us today who is the Director of the Global Youth Issues Office and Secretary Kerry's 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 here to be here at CSIS in this incredibly impressive new building and with such a terrific panel. I'm happy 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 the 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 Wellbeing 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 a thousand 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 Andre 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. Speaking 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 rooted 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 David 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 Yusuf Zai 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 the 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 the world and World War two 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% of them live in developing countries. In Africa in the Arab world 60% of the population is under the age of 30. In ASEAN countries 60% 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 US 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%. 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 them 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 one 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, Allison Keele-Friedman, who's going to discuss this during the panel discussion. But in the remaining minutes, I'd like to address briefly how we in the Department of State and our other U.S. 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. Zenit Rahman holds this position, and she's leading Department efforts on these issues. Zenit 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 policy makers. 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 U.S. released the first-ever U.S. 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 determined the present. They are 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 the Senate 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 Schranke, who's the Director of Global Programs with Freedom House and my distinguished former colleague 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 at 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 the details of legal norms and conventions may not resonate as strongly with me, but I 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 are trying to elevate and 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 going to 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 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 to 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 going to 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 going to speak much more about values today than law. I want to get underneath the law in the conventions. I want to 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 going to 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 going to 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 USA had 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. What we're left with is great rhetoric, very flowery and in some ways very inspirational language but no grit. Young people want that grit. They want to get stuck in. They want to 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? 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 going to 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 messing up the acronym. He will define it. But anyway, one of the most active independent student-led organizations fighting for the end of master atrocities and just a variety of other human rights abuses and has really helped build that movement and would love to hear not only about the work of Stan, but what some of the challenges you see are not only here in the U.S. as an American based movement, but from your work abroad. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 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 in 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 around 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 face 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 going to have, I'm sure, a number of interesting follow-up comments and questions to your marks as well. And before we get to those, I want to 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 love 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 fundamental, 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 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 the angel investor to support their big idea. All they have to put up as 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 U.S. 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 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 they, you know, 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, you know, 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, is 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 odds? 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, I mean 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, to pick up on that, 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 it's financial support, whether it's policy, systems, you talked about the systems and baseline infrastructures to not only advance their own rights, but to be 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. You know 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 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. 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 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. 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 spend 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 is 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 countries 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 you know 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 receiving you know 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 mean 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 are 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 going to be able to argue for 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 you know 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 your answer did more justice to my question than than the question did so thank you. And it's actually a good say went to my last question and I and I give that also as a heads up to you all to to get your questions going in your minds I'm sure there are many. And I'm going to ask the same question sort of to all of you as sort of a final comment before we go to the 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 Wellbeing 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 the status and the if you will of young people in a variety of different areas you know 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 the measures that we're going to be looking at that we bring into the syntax the indicators are national our national level and we you know quite frankly grappled with how do we how do we bring a human rights measure into this this picture of youth well-being. So how do we 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 are they the same as the sort of general human rights right and so my question is you know how do you think about how do how do you measure progress how can we you know 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 I shouldn't use the word for so sort of toss that up and we can carry carry that 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 you'd mind 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's 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 you know 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 taking advantage of particularly when they're in a vulnerable situation which young people often are and obviously the final one sense list is that the freedom to develop to fulfill their own potential and 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 you know thinking of that list and thinking about measuring impacts it's also important to distinguish between the means and the ends you know I think Daniel's point was really 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 you know access to information to be able to see what is going on so I think you know 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 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 you know 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 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 you know this state of optimism I think there's 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 you know an orphanage in the context where you know the parents question doesn't apply and so for me the 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 you know from fear freedom to speak how you want to and organize how you want to and so the 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 you know 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 you know questions of economic justice or meaningful political participation not you know necessarily how many meetings the president had with the youth council but perhaps you know how many sort of youth members are are present in parliament or something along those lines but I think bridging that that youth rights paradox it becomes an important way of measuring how well we in the United States are doing at promoting youth rights abroad yeah so I keep thinking about this marshmallow test and I am I'm sure probably a lot of you have heard but but there was this study done as a predictor of success for people right that 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 you know too often any human rights are viewed as the things will 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 and you know entire populations of people that are under the laws in the world they don't have access to the laws that are written you know forget about whether the laws are good or bad those don't laws don't apply to them and then you start looking at kind of the systems in which our society functions in contracting or bids or how we source or how we hire and again all of kind of those things that I speak 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 you know 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 you all of our smart people here in the audience can and will so we've got some some mics around questions hands and we'll go over here and just remind us who you are that'd be great thank you I'm 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 you know pertains youth and human rights but 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 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 you know ICC Rome statute after the genocide convention and I think it's a very similar question you know the the US depending on who you ask you know is not going to be dragged to the the ICC for you know 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 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 or 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 in both contexts but I think it's an important one if we want to see ourselves as up to date with 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 this broader question that you know I don't think there is an answer to which is again this you know sort of what are youth rights versus child rights versus the universal declaration right because you know even the the legal definition of children in 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 so then so then what you know what is the sort of youth rights agenda that need that needs or or could even be codified if you will in that 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 and 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 statistics 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 you know 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 you know I spent a good amount googling this question and I kept coming up with nothing actually I kept 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 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 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 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 taken out a loan so they didn't have that money and and really the US government at that point has nothing to do with these people but we are creating you know the the demand at the end that 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 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 we 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 off of kind of trafficking and labor exploitation you need to then have graft in the system dupe people into that are less qualified for their jobs and all the rest of it and they would lay out better than I have 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 want to put our company on the hook for saying we're fighting slavery in our supply chain because it makes better business sense and 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 counterintuitive to for the people on the front lines to say we're doing this because of dollars and cents or the other statistics that 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 and in this kind of space in particular and 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 in having a being at that population transition where they had a large youthful working for workforce that was invested in and therefore with education and skills training was therefore more productive and contributed to national growth that's a that's a much sort of clearer case that can be made and here I think it's this is 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 was 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 you know we 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 U.S. 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 it 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 and you know clearly 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 ethical language I thank you for that carrying it with me from here but but I think it you know that's that's the why and 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 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 finding ways to 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 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 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 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