In the margins of the meeting of the Joint Council on Youth (CMJ) in Strasbourg from 13 to 15 March 2023, the two co-chairs Spyros Papadatos, Chair of the Advisory Council on Youth and Jorge Orlando Queiros, Chair of the European Steering Committee for Youth, met to discuss the impact of the Council of Europe´s work on the youth sector in Europe through its co-management system – an example of co-decision and participatory democracy.
“The Council of Europe has been organising some landmark campaigns for young people: All equal – all different, No Hate Speech, Democracy here - Democracy Now. As a young person, I think they are lifechanging because they manage to put on the table topics like diversity, discrimination, intolerance, and democracy”, said Spyros Papadatos.
He emphasized that the most important thing that the Council of Europe is doing in the Youth sector is not only empowering individual young people but equipping them, in turn, to empower others. “It is raising Europeans that will multiply whatever they have learned when they go back to their societies. It is something that I experienced myself. If you would have asked me a few years back when I started as a young person from a rural area, an island in Greece (Korfu), I would never have imagined that I would be privileged enough to be sitting in this committee representing not only my youth organisation, but also so many voices of youths around Europe. I can bring the youth perspective, not only withing the Youth department and the Youth sector of the Council of Europe but cross sectionally to the entire institution and to the wider European society”.
Jorge Orlando Queiros from Portugal, representing the governmental point of view in the co-management system, explained the added value that the Council of Europe is bringing to his work.
“Energy! That the dialogue between governmental bodies and youth organisations is possible. Not only in the framework of consultative roles, but also in the process of co-creating projects, identifying problems and trends that in the end will contribute to shaping youth policies. And for me, this exercise is very important. It is something I say every time I come back home: if it works here, why cannot it work elsewhere? If we manage, without conflict, to co-create and co-decide, why can´t we replicate these examples, this environment in other dimensions of our lives? Both at national level and at local level. There are experiments, but they have not yet reached this far as we have in the Council of Europe”.
