Sopport to Establishment of a UN Permanent Forum on Youth. Letter to share within our movements.

www.icmyo.org twitter: @icmyo facebook.com/icmyo [email protected] To All Permanent Representations, 10 October 2013 Forum on Youth: Now is the time! To whom it may concern, The International Coordination Meeting of Youth Organisations (ICMYO) is the network that represents the largest international youth-led NGOs and government-recognized regional youth platforms. We speak for the collective voice of almost 30 organisations comprising ICMYO. We have always had a very strong interest in ensuring that young people are given a viable role to play in the policy decisions affecting their futures. That is why we support the establishment of a UN Permanent Forum on Youth, a mechanism that meaningfully provides youth with an avenue through which policy at the highest levels can be affected and the World Programme of Action for Youth can be reviewed. Young people will no longer accept tokenistic modes of inclusion or lack of action on the World Programme that you agreed on almost 20 years ago. We want to express our eagerness to contribute to this initiative; we feel we can contribute at a much higher level than we currently are able through the ECOSOC Youth Forum. We support the inclusion of an Operational Paragraph requesting the Secretary General to explore more permanent methods of engagement with youth organizations in the UN which will include a review mechanism for the WPAY and based on the best practices of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and build on the worked started in the ECOSOC Youth Forum. In ECOSOC reform resolution A/RES/68/1, you already stated that ECOSOC should “further promote the integration of youth into its deliberations, building on the past positive experiences.” Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon