In the past few days I have been in Strasbourg at the Council of Europe (CoE), attending the 'Conference on the parliamentary dimension of election observation: applying common standards'. As I am not a member of any sort of parliament, and as I'm neither an expert on election observation (even though it says so on my badge to get into the CoE), you may wonder what I was doing here. The story goes like this: the CoE's Advisory Council on youth issues, in which former IFLRY Executive Director Monika Jankauskaite is an elected member, has taken up the initiative to look at possibilities of including a so-called 'youth dimension' into the various election observation missions (EOMs). Such EOMs are mostly organized by intergouvernmental organizations (OSCE, Council of Europe) or NGOs like the National Democratic Institute or the Carter Center (but also look here!), and primarily take place in transitional democracies or other rather 'weak' democracies in which it is feared that fraud or corruption may distort the election outcome. The focus is not only on the situation at the actual day of voting, but also on the run-up to the elections, and in the case of the latter the long-term observers conduct various consultation rounds with representatives of civil society.

And here we arrive at one of my objectives here at the conference: we (that is: me and a few other 'youth' representatives) are talking with all the people that are present to find out to what extent, during EOMs, political youth organizations are being consulted and in general how much they are concerned with issues like political youth participation and political student mobilisation. Ideally, which is more or less our second objective, we would like to include teams of young people in the EOMs in order to actually take up the task as described before. This would also have a strong symbolic function: if in the country in question the political participation of young people and students is significantly weak (which is also the case when political youth organisations simply serve as applauding machines for a certain party), then the appearance of and interaction with those young election observers may stimulate others to become active. Of course, if we would ever deploy young election observers, whether in the context of official organizations or by ourselves, they would need to get some sort of training. Hopefully, the Council of Europe, with its two Youth Centers in Strasbourg and Budapest (where probably some of you have spent some happy days at a seminar), will be able to provide such a training. The conference itself was also important in order to get acquainted with the wide range of actors involved in the EOMs. Unfortunately, I have personally never participated in an EOM, even though I was a bit involved in the LYMEC EOM to Azerbaijan.

Speaking about LYMEC - and finishing this blog - I would like to draw your attention to their successful 'No Visa' campaign. Last Tuesday, in many different countries in Europe, young liberals went to the streets in order to collect signatures for a petition in which the EU is requested to open up its borders for students and tourists from the non-EU countries in Europe. It was great to read an article about the campaign in perhaps the most prestigious newspaper in the Netherlands!