Press releases

MINSK, 8 July (BelTA) – Minsk hosted an official ceremony to appoint 13 members of the UN Youth Advisory Panel (UN YAP) in Belarus, BelTA has learned.

Decisions on key global issues are often made by governments. They do not pay enough attention to the opinions of ordinary people, especially young people. There is an old saying: older men declare war, but it is the youth that must fight and die. And it is still relevant today. The problem is that adult people often forget about how cool it is to be young. They do not understand fears and concerns of the youth. We hope that the establishment of the Youth Advisory Panel in Belarus will remind the society about the problems of young people, said UN Resident Coordinator/UNDP Resident Representative in Belarus Sanaka Samarasinha who took part in the event.

Nikita Trafimovich, Mikhail Matskevich, Alexander Krot, Mariya Kolb, Vladislav Lagun, Dmitry Zhemchuzhnikov, Marina Shtrakhova, Vyacheslav Volovik, Lyudmila Kostyko, Vasily Demidchik, Vladimir Petrosyan, Lyubov Kudelko and Alexander Alexeyev have been included in the UN Youth Advisory Panel. Now they can put forward ideas and recommendations to the UN youth organizations, take part in the events of the UN agencies in charge of youth affairs.

For the UN it is very important to focus on the problems of the youth all over the world. In order to engage more young people in the activities of our organization and to solve global youth problems more efficiently the UN Secretary General initiated the founding of youth advisory panels. Such panels already exist in Sri Lanka, Nepal and other countries. The UN YAP has been recently established in Ukraine. I am very glad that Belarus supported this initiative, Sanaka Samarasinha remarked.