Youth rights in the context of "Voting age"

The European Youth Forum (French: Youth Forum Jeunesse, YFJ) is an international non-profit association that serves as an umbrella organisation and advocacy group of the national youth councils and international non-governmental youth organisations in Europe. It works on youth rights in international institutions such as the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the United Nations.

The European Youth Forum is one of the highest-funded youth-oriented NGOs in Europe. The forum works mostly in the fields of youth policy and youth work development. It focuses its work on European youth policy matters, whilst through engagement on the global level, it is enhancing the capacities of its members and promoting global interdependence. In its daily work, the European Youth Forum represents the views and opinions of youth organisations in all relevant policy areas and promotes the cross-sectoral nature of youth policy towards a variety of institutional actors. The principles of equality and sustainable development are mainstreamed in the work of the European Youth Forum.

Youth suffrage is the right to vote for young people. It forms part of the broader universal suffrage and youth rights movements. Most democracies have lowered the voting age to between 16 and 18, while some advocates for children's suffrage hope to remove age restrictions entirely.

Children's rights or the rights of children are a subset of human rights with particular attention to the rights of special protection and care afforded to minors. The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) defines a child as "any human being below the age of eighteen years, unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier." Children's rights includes their right to association with both parents, human identity as well as the basic needs for physical protection, food, universal state-paid education, health care, and criminal laws appropriate for the age and development of the child, equal protection of the child's civil rights, and freedom from discrimination on the basis of the child's race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, disability, color, ethnicity, or other characteristics.

Interpretations of children's rights range from allowing children the capacity for autonomous action to the enforcement of children being physically, mentally and emotionally free from abuse, though what constitutes "abuse" is a matter of debate. Other definitions include the rights to care and nurturing. There are no definitions of other terms used to describe young people such as "adolescents", "teenagers", or "youth" in international law, but the children's rights movement is considered distinct from the youth rights movement. The field of children's rights spans the fields of law, politics, religion, and morality.

Evolving capacities is the concept in which education, child development and youth development programs led by adults take into account the capacities of the child or youth to exercise rights on their own behalf. It is also directly linked to the right to be heard, requiring adults to be mindful of their responsibilities to respect children's rights, protect them from harm, and provide opportunities so they can exercise their rights. The concept of evolving capacities is employed internationally as a direct alternative to popular concepts of child and youth development.

The Peoples' Democratic Party (Turkish: Halkların Demokratik Partisi, acronymized as HDP; Kurdish: Partiya Demokratîk a Gelan), or Democratic Party of the Peoples, is a Turkish political party mainly representing ethnic minorities in Turkey, especially Kurds. Generally left-wing, the party places a strong emphasis on participatory and radical democracy, feminism, minority rights, youth rights, and egalitarianism. It is an associate member of the Party of European Socialists (PES), a consultative member of the Socialist International, and a party within the Progressive Alliance (PA).

Aspiring to fundamentally challenge the existing Turkish–Kurdish divide and other existing parameters in Turkish politics, the HDP was founded in 2012 as the political wing of the Peoples' Democratic Congress, a union of numerous left-wing movements that had previously fielded candidates as independents to bypass the 10% election threshold. The HDP is in an alliance with the Kurdish Democratic Regions Party (DBP), often described as the HDP's fraternal party. From 2013 to 2015, the politicians of the DBP participated in peace negotiations between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).