Who Are the Youth?

Dr. Bahaa Helmy Writes Who Are the Youth?                                   

A question posed on the United Nations website in order to define youth and their situation as one of the global issues.

Despite the relevance and appeal of the question, it is a subject that calls for research and study into the reasons for the organization’s failure to set a comprehensive and clear definition of youth, and the reasons for not explaining the justification for treating youth as a global issue?.

With regard to the definition, the organization acknowledges that there is no internationally agreed definition of the youth age group other than the definition adopted by the General Assembly in 1981, according to which youth are “persons between the ages of 15 and 24 years”, and consequently persons who have not reached fifteen are children.

At the same time, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child defines “persons up to the age of 18 as children”, and obliges its States Parties to take the provisions of the Convention into account when enacting domestic legislation, whether with regard to setting the age, criminal responsibility or the other rights provided for in it.

The organization was not ashamed, when justifying this contradiction, to say that it had been hoped that the Convention on the Rights of the Child would provide protection and rights to the largest possible age group, since there is no similar instrument on the rights of youth. It is an excuse worse than the offence.

The United Nations definition of youth is at odds with reality and with the law in most countries of the world, because the criteria for defining youth differ with regard to the age at which a person is treated as an adult in national laws, and according to the social, cultural, institutional, economic and political factors of each society.

In Egypt, the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics announced that the number of young people aged 18 to 29 reached 20.2 million, equivalent to 21% of the population in 2019, thereby following the national Child Law and the aforementioned Convention, and adhering to the upper limit of youth according to the definition of the world organization.

This issue raises many questions in light of the trend of public opinion in Egyptian society calling for a reconsideration of the age of the child and their criminal responsibility for acts criminalized by law, in light of the repeated commission by children who are over 15 and not over 18 – according to the current law – of crimes of bullying, violence and rape in cases that have shaken society and all humanity.

Practical reality in most Western countries shows that young people who have turned 16 go out to work and rely on themselves to earn a living and complete their education, and science and medicine determine the age of puberty and maturity. Many countries of the world set the age of majority (full legal capacity) at 18 instead of the age of 21 under Egyptian law.

Among the questions raised. Why has the organization failed over the past 40 years to prepare a new convention for youth dealing with the age of youth and their real issues in a way that matches reality? Instead of confusing and merging the issues of childhood and its needs, which differ from the issues of youth and their demands on governments, and the responsibilities of youth, which consist in working to develop their societies economically, socially, politically and culturally.

It is illogical for the United Nations to classify youth as a global issue without real justifications suited to the different age brackets or groups; yesterday we were young, today our children are young, and tomorrow the grandchildren will be the young; youth are the fuel of the present and the pillar of the future and of progress.

Development and progress are the issue, not youth. Why does the United Nations portray youth as an issue, and what efforts are being made to resolve this issue, as the organization puts it.

We hope that the Shura Council will be tasked with studying Egypt’s adoption of a draft or proposal to amend the Convention on the Rights of the Child with regard to the age of the child, so that it becomes under 16 years, enabling the Egyptian legislator to amend the age of the child to under 16, with the possibility of lowering the age of majority (full capacity) to 18 instead of the 21 currently provided for, while amending the Penal Code and criminal responsibility for crimes committed according to legal status.

It is a call to set new global and national standards for the age of youth and age brackets, to remove the contradiction, ambiguity and discrimination that may affect the age brackets from 30 to 40 and from 40 to 50, especially since some studies indicate that maturity is completed in the third decade of life.