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Excellencies, co-facilitators,

I speak on behalf of the EU and its Member States. The Candidate Countries Türkiye, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Albania, Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the potential candidate country Georgia, as well as Andorra and Monaco align themselves with this statement.

[Youth]

If we want a United Nations that endures, we should place young persons systematically and effectively at the heart of our discussions. We need young persons’ vision to forge a more inclusive, equitable, sustainable and just future for all.

The EU calls upon the UN to endorse a global standard for youth engagement that is rights-based, safe, inclusive, equitable and sufficiently resourced. Participation is enshrined as a fundamental human right in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The UN should make meaningful child and youth engagement and participation a requirement in all UN intergovernmental mechanisms and processes, including in the negotiations leading up to the Summit of the Future. Young persons, in particular young women, should be engaged at the global, regional, and national levels, from policy preparation to implementation and evaluation, and through national youth consultative bodies. We also encourage youth engagement in multilateralism, including through Model UN.

In order to achieve meaningful and inclusive youth engagement at the UN, the UN and Member States should consider ways to support the engagement of young persons and remove barriers, including access to social protection, for young person’s participation. The UN should stimulate intergenerational dialogues to build more trust, help increase the availability of accessible financial resources for youth-led and youth-focused organizations, and create youth-friendly information services about participation. Furthermore, we should establish clear and effective monitoring mechanisms to track progress in this regard.

As we navigate towards the Summit, youth engagement in the process cannot merely be a matter of symbolic consultation. It has to be meaningful and inclusive, working towards genuine partnerships on issues. The UN Youth Office under the leadership of the new Assistant Secretary-General should take the helm in coordinating youth engagement in the process, and to this end should consider using diverse formats such as virtual consultations, calls for written inputs, and preparatory in-person events, in order to facilitate the widest possible participation.

Moreover, the Pact for the Future and its accompanying Declaration must integrate youth issues across the three pillars of the UN that are all interconnected:

• Peace and Security: Effective participation of young persons and their inclusion in decision-making in conflict prevention and conflict resolution is essential. Youth should therby be integrated in all stages of peacebuilding and peace processes,while ensuring consistency with the Women, Peace and Security Agenda.

• Sustainable Development: Young persons’ development needs must be addressed through inclusive policies that foster health, education, gender equality, digital and transferable skills, employment in green sectors, entrepreneurship, innovation, and climate action. Children and youth are positive agents of change to achieve all SDGs.

• Human Rights: Upholding the rights of children and young personsn a holistic manner, and those of women and girls in particular, offline and online, is paramount to a thriving global society. This includes promoting gender equality, combating discrimination and stereotypes, ensuring equal opportunities and accessible quality education systems, access to sexual and reproductive health, promoting full, equal and meaningful political participation and leadership, safeguarding freedom of expression, fostering responsible citizenship, enabling civil society's flourishing, protecting human rights defenders, and ensuring the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, among other issues.

The EU urges all UN member states to commit to not just listening but acting on the voices of young persons, ensuring they are not left behind, but rather, are leading the way forward

[Future Generations]

We think youth and future generations are different issues that need to be treated separately in the Pact. Each requires distinct sets of mechanisms in place so that youth is better included, while the interests of future generations are consistently part of decisions. In addition, youth should not bear the responsibility for and accountability to future generations.

On the Declaration on Future Generations that will be annexed to the Pact:

We all have, firstly, a moral obligation to the generations that will come after us; and secondly, that when we take into account the interests of future generations when making our policies today, this benefits also our current generations.

To hold up this noble principle, we need to adopt a concise and action-oriented Declaration on Future Generations for endorsement at the Summit of the Future. It should reflect the general issues relevant to future generations and contain commitments to safeguard their interests.

We appreciate the work that has already been done by the co-facilitators (Jamaica and the Kingdom of the Netherlands), which culminated in an issues paper with nine Guiding Principles.

We should encourage all levels of government, including the UN itself, and stakeholders to include attention for future generation into decision-making, and to enable exchange of knowledge and experiences in this regard.

A concrete way to ensure that we remain attentive to future generations in our policymaking could be the positive consideration of the proposal of a Special Envoy for Future Generations, providing that the funding, role and mandate are well defined.

We save the rest of our substantive contributions for next year when the process for the Declaration on Future Generations will commence.

Let me conclude by reiterating that the EU remains closely involved and supportive of this process. We are ready to contribute to it also with our strong expertise on strategic foresight and best-practices, for instance when it comes to anchoring the rights of future generations in national constitutions or jurisdictions.

Thank you!