New Youth Sector Strategy 2030 On Thursday, 23 January 2020, we launched the new Council of Europe youth sector strategy 2030. After two years of development process in the decision-making body of the Council of Europe youth sector, the Committee of Ministers formally adopted the Council of Europe Youth Strategy 2030 which will provide the policy guidance and a broad political roadmap for the period 2020-30. We launched the new Agenda with the Secretary General of the Counc

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There are many policy areas to target, therefore in order to make this text more coherent and precise, I will focus on three policy areas which I consider highly important for an inclusive society and to a great extent also concern the youth - Those three areas are Jobs; Education; and Participation. To begin with jobs, for us in the centre-right spectrum, it is our firm position that jobs are primarily created by the private sector. We therefore need to make it possible for

Young people are worried about the future and are concerned about those who represent them. If we want to be honest with ourselves, politicians are not always listening to the real concerns of people and sometimes they seem to not understand that politics is not a game. Certainly, in many aspects politicians need to better themselves but at the same time young people walking away is definitely not the answer. I recently came across a study of the European Youth Forum saying t

Europe as the rest of the developed world is facing an era of great technological change. Digital innovations are reshaping our society and economy with a speed like never before. Our lives are now full of new terms: Cloud, internet of things, big data, artificial intelligence, robotics and many others. Some five years ago, no one had heard of Uber or the hotel substitute service Air-Bnb but now almost everybody knows about these two online services. We have seen computers to

What is indeed becoming a problem in Europe is the illiberal wave against free trade, globalisation, immigration and tolerance for difference. Even worse, some times those views are supported by outright nativist and racist parties. If liberal democratic parties are going to win back voters, first of all we need to stop simply reacting to solutions offered by the populists, and instead we have to regain the initiative in the public debate. After all it was parties like the EP

When I was running for EDS Chairman one and a half years ago, things were already difficult but sadly since then, events have moved so fast and the political landscape has altered so severely that it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the European Union which we are accustomed with is under threat. Although we can only meet those challenges all together, our generation has been granted a special role - to strengthen Europe's perception among the young generations and hen

We have all heard of the term Generation Y, the demographic cohort born from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. Generation Y is better educated than any that preceded it, grew up with the internet and travelled abroad. Our ambitions are set very high. We also grew up with the European Union as a perfectly normal part of our lives and accustomed to peace. The fall of the Iron Curtain is at best a childhood memory. Young Europeans today enjoy greater freedoms than ever before,

The United Kingdom and the European Union have shared a long-standing but not always harmonious relationship. In the referendum of 1975, Britons voted in favour of staying in the Common Market but since then there have been growing calls for another vote. The basis of these calls is that the EU has changed a lot over the past 40 years, in terms of expansion and extending its control over more aspects of daily lives. While the above argument is to a certain extent true, what i