Organization for Youth Education & Development (OYED)

Legislation Regarding the Youth in EU Member States

Legislation Regarding the Youth in EU Member States

Europe is a multicultural continent, with different values, cultures, history and policies. The European Union serves as a common foundation where Member States can discuss their issues and find solutions together. Such an issue is: the future of youth. Since the mid-2000’s, dialogues regarding youth increased. The European Union launched actions to tackle the problems faced by youth across Europe. Member States joined this course of action and adopted many recommendations from the European Union. Some countries implemented their own strategies.

In our research, we focused on legal and normative acts adopted by EU Member States, with the intent of outlining the relevant laws, which were implemented to tackle the problems and hence promote youth issues within each Member State. The purpose of this paper is to combine information and knowledge on youth issues in EU Member States. Legislations were not solely picked on terms of youth policies, but rather they encompass all those legislations that attempt to fill the lacunas of youth empowerment, keeping in mind the cultural heritage of each Member State. 

The research was not undertaken with any difficulties, we made use of database networks provided by official sources including: the youthpolicy.org database, as well as the official gazette each Member State provides on the country’s webpage. The research was made challenging by a lack of English language content on the countries’ official webpages. Additionally, it has come to our attention that some Member States are still deficient with regards to the implementation of EU recommendations on the issue, despite publishing Acts regarding youth, issues vis-à-vis youth empowerment are still not dealt with in a serious manner. In some cases, we found that in spite of a country’s scarcity of youth normative and legal act surrounding the topic, a strong co-operation with public actors and non-public actors still provides the possibility for young people to prosper.

The list of member states analyzed can be found via the hyperlinks below: