A/HRC/34/46 Youth Council of Ireland. The panellists were Anne Lambelin, Senator in the Federal Parliament of Belgium and delegate at the Inter-Parliamentary Union Forum of Young Parliamentarians; Tomaž Deželan, Associate Professor of Political Science, Jean Monnet Chair for Citizenship Education and Vice-Dean for Quality Assurance and Development at the University of Ljubljana; Aya Chebbi, activist and blogger, and member of the Board of Directors of CIVICUS World Alliance for Citizen Participation; and Anshul Tewari, founder and editor-in-chief of YouthKiAwaaz.com and director of the board of the Indian organization Collectively. Discussions focused on ways to ensure that young people had access to formal institutions, including their representation in parliaments and political parties. Opportunities and challenges related to online activism and e-participation were also debated. 32. Ms. Lambelin discussed the role of youth in parliaments and its importance for strengthening the rule of law and building inclusive democracies. Increasing demands by young people to be included in decision-making came from the informal space, thus questioning the ability of formal institutions to receive and address those demands. Formal and informal mechanisms were complementary in increasing the participation of youth in public affairs. Ms. Lambelin provided statistics showing how few young people were members of parliament and the absence of bodies or committees dedicated to youth issues, and the level of disenchantment of youth with politics and political institutions. She shared her experience as a young female parliamentarian confronting the many barriers preventing young people, particularly women, from becoming parliamentarians, including sexism and discriminatory attitudes. Additional economic, social and cultural barriers, including lack of adequate financial means, contributed to fostering the exclusion of young people from formal politics and institutions. Ms. Lambelin praised initiatives by the Inter-Parliamentary Union to mobilize parliaments to encourage greater participation by young people in political life, including through the establishment of the Forum of Young Parliamentarians, an international youth-led body that brought together young parliamentarians from around the world to monitor and promote youth participation. Finally, she noted that, at a time when the number of young people in the world had never been larger, their representation was a real necessity to inspire confidence in and to preserve and strengthen democracies. 33. Mr. Deželan highlighted some of the challenges faced by contemporary democracies. He noted that when a large segment of the youth were absent from the political process, the preconditions of collective self-rule were threatened and the social contract broken. Democracies suffered when decisions were made for youth without proper representation, particularly when those decisions concerned the adoption of austerity measures, as they often impacted disproportionally on youth, who were in a situation of socioeconomic vulnerability. It was important to understand why youth did not participate or were not adequately represented in politics and democratic institutions as a necessary preliminary step towards developing strategies to reform political structures and make them more relevant to youth. To that end, he explained the differences between the following categories of youth: those who were apathetic towards public life; those who were uninformed, or not interested in politics because they believed they did not know enough about politics to engage; those who were distrustful of politicians and the political system; and those who felt disempowered, despite being well informed about politics, and felt that nothing would change through their participation. In that context, he identified two critical goals that had the potential to improve the legitimacy, political efficacy and performance of political institutions: the creation of enabling structures grounded in the principles of inclusion and non-discrimination, and the improvement of the capacity of young people to act independently and to make their own free and informed choices. 34. Ms. Chebbi shared the experience of Tunisian young people in the post-revolution era and the expectation of an emerging young generation that they could participate effectively in shaping democratic institutions and political processes. Democratic transition 9