A/HRC/35/7 I. Introduction 1. In its resolution 32/1, the Human Rights Council decided to convene at its thirtythird session a panel discussion on youth and human rights. It requested the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to liaise with States and all stakeholders, including relevant United Nations agencies, funds and programmes, the treaty bodies, the special procedures of the Human Rights Council, national human rights institutions and civil society, including representatives of youth organizations, with a view to ensuring their participation in the panel discussion. 2. The interactive panel discussion was chaired by the President of the Human Rights Council and moderated by the Permanent Representative of Greece to the United Nations Office and other international organizations in Geneva. The United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights delivered an opening statement, after which a video statement by the Envoy of the Secretary-General on Youth was screened. The panellists were a member of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the President of the European Youth Forum, a representative of the Asociación Tierra de Jóvenes, El Salvador, a representative of the International Volunteerism Organization for Women, Education and Development (VIDES International) and the Head of the Social and Human Sciences Sector, Multisectoral Regional Office for Central Africa, Yaoundé, of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). 3. Following the panellists’ brief opening remarks, the representatives of States, national human rights institutions and non-governmental organizations and other observers were encouraged to intervene by asking questions, making comments and sharing good practices, challenges and recommendations on the way forward. The panel discussion provided a platform for experts and representatives of stakeholders to identify challenges, best practices and lessons learned in the exercise of human rights by young people, and relevant opportunities for the empowerment of young people in the exercise of their rights. II. Opening remarks 4. In her opening remarks, the Deputy High Commissioner said that the combination of current demographic realities and the pace of global change made young people the generation of our time, and the sustainable development generation. There were currently 1.8 billion young people worldwide, the most the world had ever seen, meaning that there could be no sustainable development without them and no sustained development if not for them. Young people were currently three times more likely to be unemployed, with 73 million of them looking for but not finding employment; when they did find work, they laboured in far more precarious conditions than adults, in the absence of equal pay for equal work. Some 27 million young people were migrants: far from their homes, travelling sometimes unaccompanied, often precariously, in flight from a life they believed they could not sustain and in search for a life of security and improved standards of living. 5. Young people under the age of 30 constituted 43 per cent of all homicide victims. Sexual violence disproportionately affected young girls and women, and complications in pregnancy and childbirth were the second biggest killers of adolescent girls in developing countries, despite being largely preventable. Every year at least 3 million girls aged 15 to 19 underwent unsafe abortions. Globally, adolescents were the only age group for whom deaths due to AIDS had increased, by about 50 per cent between 2000 and 2015, in contrast with a 32 per cent decrease among other age groups in the same period. Globally, relative poverty and lack of opportunity was a disproportionate and particular challenge for young people. In Niger, the average age was 15, in South Sudan, 17 and in Nigeria and Yemen, 18. The demography of relative privilege was much older and ageing; the average age in Denmark was 41, in Austria, 44 and in Germany and Japan, 46. There was a need for more inclusive engagement with the largest generation of potential, in terms of energy, creativity, passion and talent to which the world had ever had access, and yet, around the world, only 1.65 per cent of parliamentarians were in their 20s, and the average age of parliamentarians 2