LEAPMediateam of Vilnius Regional Session

ISSUE 1

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EDITORIAL

Trying new things is terrifying. Being a first time delegate,

journalist, Chairperson or ed-itor can feel like one of the scariest things you will ever-do. However, we do them anyway. With EYP we push

are boundries. We take that leap of faith.

Editor: Mirjam Pieters (NLVideo Editor: Ana Anchustegui (ES)Journalists: Natallia Valadzko (BY), Ugnė Alškaitė (LT), Elza Linda Purvinska (LV), Niko Lammi (FI), Kaja Silva Aulik (EE)

CONTENT

LIBE

EMPL

DROI

FEMM

CULT

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TARGET SURVEILANCE

The debate about which is more important – security or privacy, has been going on since the beginning of the digital era, but recently has spiked due to multiple in-formation leaks that have affected millions of people. It appears that the debate about this issue would be a two-stance debate, where in actuality, it is three-sided. See which one you agree with the most.There are masses stating that pri-vacy stands above security. “Every-body has the right to be forgotten” or “we should be informed when and where we are being surveiled” are the main arguments for this cluster of people.

When talking about information online, we're all aware of the cook-ies, cache and metadata, the little 'monsters' that are responsible for documenting and remembering every move we make online. The websites we visit on our comput-ers, the videos we watch on our phones and the applications we download on our tablets. We are not necessarily being tracked, but we are being survailed.

However, I would like to empha-size the fact that there are two types of surveilance – mass

MASS SURVEILANCE

Safety vs PrivacyBy

Elza

Purv

insk

a surveilance and target surveilance. The difference between the two is immense.

The aim of mass surveilance is to store all of the data that is collect-ed from the cloud (e.g. internet, public camera surveilance ect.) to potencially eliminate threats such as terrorist attacks, murders, bur-glaries and others. Furthermore, it also serves as a helpful tool in fed-eral investigations.

Target surveillance, as its name stated, has specific targets. It can be a group of people or one per-son. Target surveillance, in simple terms, is monitoring. Following any and all activity online, usage of credit cards and movement though the streets via surveillance cameras.

Second stance being – secu-rity goes above and beyond privacy. The people who stand on this side of the de-bate say that they would be less affected by their personal infor-mations leaking than to be sur-veiled by their government. They do not see a problem with banks getting alerts when a person withdraw-als more than 10 000 euros or with sur-veillance videos being stored for several years, because they realize that it is for their own, as well as society’s, security.

If you found yourself disagreeing with both of these statements, don’t you worry, a popular opinion among people is that it is up to the per-son what they put in the cloud, starting from information published on social media platforms and sites visited, to credit card usage and digital footprint in general. We can control which sites we visit, what informa-tion we publish, how we handle our finances, where we go and by which means of transportation we travel.

At the end of the day, no opinion is wrong, because everybody is enti-tled to their personal views and usage of modern day technology. Yes, we have the right to be forgotten. Yes, the governemt is responsible for keeping the country safe. Yes, we have a grasp on our informations out-put. There are many layers to each cluster of this debate.

All of them are right and wrong on some level, but it is up to you to choose which side you belong to or to create your own. Do not obstain, do not be the person who doesn’t have an opinion on an important issue. Take a stance and be open to discuss. •

Success, skills, occupation, networking are words that we have all heard of, but what if I say that almost 1 in 4 youngsters in the EU wouldn’t experience any of this in their formative years because they are out of work?So, what’s happening? Let’s make a lit-tle role play to get a clearer picture of the situation. There is Stephanie, a young girl, top of the class at high school and then university. Mark is an employer in a common firm. We also have Mr. Thompson, an educator, who represents education as a whole. And to cap it all, there is Member State A (MS A) with an unemployment rate of more than 40% and Member State B (MS B) with less than 10%.

The question is what the youth unem-ployment impact implies. For start-ers, less experience and smaller wages eventually lead to young adults - such as Stephanie - taking longer to get mar-ried, buy homes and begin families.

A skilled and motivated workforce is the lifeblood of any economy. If com-panies cannot find suitable employees, they cannot compete. Mark is at a dis-advantage.

In the long run, it also means slow-er economic growth and lower tax re-ceipts. MS A risk social instability.

Bearing in mind that working young-people gain purpose, self-esteem, learn how to work in teams and handle

responsibilities, it is even more ur-gent to get to the roots of the problem: lacklustre economic growth, a rigid labour market and varying perceptions of work.

Then, for a mismatch between poten-tial employees’ skills and employers’ needs we blame Mr. Thompson who couldn’t provide Stephanie with suit-able abilities.

He failed to ensure a solid link be-tween theoretical info and practical job skills.At the same times workplaces seem to disappear. This is due to outsourcing, which means taking a job that could be done in one country and having it done elsewhere, generally overseas. In fact, in 2013 2 million jobs were sent to China and Indonesia.

A disparity between Member States’ labour market situations does not simplify anything. For instance, MS A, who among others is Spain and Greece, differ greatly from MS B, i.e. Germany and Austria. Reasons may be varying economic growth rates, ed-ucational techniques, but most impor-tantly – employability, which leads us not only to regional but also European

The Lost Generation

By Natallia Valadzko

level.

While the seriousness of the situation demands for rapid action and a consensus at the highest levels of the European institutions, you may ask: has anything at all been done to combat the problem besides innumerable meetings? The answer is ‘sure, don’t overreact, young man’.

Firstly, the European Commission’s approaches include Youth Guarantee and Your first EURES Job whose aim is to help young EU citizens aged 18-30 find a job, traineeship or apprenticeship in any EU country.

Further example is apprenticeship as a form of struggle against youth unemploy-ment. In such a way, British Prime Minister David Cameron vows to create 3 million apprenticeships. However, there’s still a heated debate over whether it’s ‘a helping hand’ or just ‘cheap labour’.

Summarizing, the term of ‘Lost Generation’ is being reborn due to unprecedent-ed unemployment rates across Europe and the effect they have on young people’s lives. The responsibility of all Marks, Mr. Thompsons, Member States A and B is to ensure that Stephanie has her fundamental right – the right to decent work and protection against unemployment.

If they do, in 2030 we may see a world where environmentally sustainable eco-nomic development is the norm; a world where we’ve ended extreme poverty and hunger; and a world where women and men have achieved social equality everywhere.

That is the world today’s young people want. Let’s give them the tools to build it.•

Born to be wild? : The ins and outs of ISISOver the last couple of years, ISIS is something we have all learned to fear and despise. The average educated citizen is very much aware that ISIS is a group of religious islamic extremists that spend their time terrorising and brutally killing extremely large amounts of innocent locals resulting in the very serious refugee crisis we keep hearing of on a daily basis. But how much do you truly know about ISIS and its initiatives? Here is a simple guide to the past, pres-ent and potential future of ISIS, that will hopefully make it easier to under-stand why these people believe in the principles of something that seems so incredibly inhumane.The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or simply Islam-ic State (IS) is a Salafi jihadist extrem-ist military group and self-proclaimed Islamic State caliphate mainly led and compsed of Sunni Arabs from Iraq and Syria. It is largely funded through oil smuggling, but also through criminal enterprise. A caliphate is the government or rank of a spiritual leader of Islam and Salafi jihadism is a transnational reli-gious-political ideology based on the be-lief in a violent jihad and the movement of returning to “true” Sunni Islam.

It all began with the Syrian Civil war,

which is an on-go-ing conflict be-tween its long-serv-ing government and those seeking to dismiss it. The current regime leaders - The Assad family, has held power in Syria since 1971 but unlike most leaders, are not reli-giously extreme. Despite that, people are still angry at their government mostly beacuse of the failure of long-promised economic and political reforms.

By 2011, several independant groups wanting to take matters of evicting the

Born to be wild? : The ins and outs of ISIS By Kaya Aulik

current government into their own hands, such as ISIS had formed with the aim of toppling the government without any ex-ternal command or control.

The mission of ISIS is to create an Islam-ic state, called a caliphate, where

sharia law is strictly enforced and led by a single supreme

religious and political lead-er, called a caliph. Sharia

law is based on teach-ings of the Qur’an and requires all people under the caliphate’s jurisdiction to stand for them. In case of disobaying the law, violent pun-ishments such as flogging, stoning, hanging, beheading, crucifixion, and am-

putation are adminis-tered.

The scary thing is, ISIS is more than just a mili-

tary force. It has established governing structures through-

out the territories it rules and has built a system that can provide the basic

services of an actual established state in-cluding governors and even financial and legislative bodies.

Because of their effective use of social me-dia, ISIS has gained world-wide publicity

and has recruited thousands of foreign fighters to come to Syria and Iraq and fight for what they believe in. Foreign fighters are coming from all over the world, the majority from Chechnya, but also from France, Britain, other Europe-an countries, and even the USA.

All in all, it’s fair to say ISIS is more than a group of armed men in masks with the intention of spreading their re-ligion. If you strip away what goes way beyond the foundation of basic human rights, all they want is for their people to have a voice.

Their way of achieving that goal is definitely not something we as a first world society approve of but the goal itself is definitely something a lot of us can relate to. Hopefully we can all still agree that the actions of this group are absolutely horrendous and need to come to end, but at least now, the next time you express your frustration towards ISIS, you’ll actually know what you’re talking about.

Positive discrimination in the labour market as a way to break the glass ceiling. Why is it that seem-ingly unbreakable barrier keeps holding women from rising in the corporate ladder or in any sort of labour environment. For example, in the Forbes billionaires list there’s only 12 women out of a 100 billionaires. In the Fortune 500, a list of CEOs of the largest 500 companies in the USA, the numbers are even smaller. Out of a total 500, only 26 are women.

Affirmative Action. Breaking the Glass

Ceiling?

Okay, let’s break up the terms. Positive discrimination is also known as affirmative action. What this means in a nutshell is to favour a group of discrimination within a culture or a country. In this case what the topic wants to ask you, is should EU start forcing gender quotas inside corpo-rate ladders and even countries leadership.

When you read “glass ceiling”, not many of you think of a political term, but this refers to, “the unseen, yet unbreakable barrier that keeps minorities and women from rising to the upper rungs of the corporate ladder, re-gardless of their qualifications or achieve-ments.” And this is seen in everyday life, women not getting hired even though they would have same or better qualifications than a man, or women being objectified and being hired just because of their appearance. This can go both ways, this is not just about discrimination against women, this reaches to all of the fields of labour, the ones that are male-oriented, such as construction or firefighting and the ones that are female-oriented, such as kindergarten teachers or flight attendants. And these are very stereotypical examples of jobs which can have over 95% gender dominance.

If we break this down even further, we get such examples as Afri-can-American people in the US. They have been severely discriminated

By Niko Lammi

Gender equalisation is very often misunder-stood for only women’s undermining, obvi-ously this is not true and true equalisation should be looked from both men’s and wom-en’s perspectives. It doesn’t help the situation that there’s still some countries that don’t even allow women to vote or drive.

There’s also other alarming example of men being victims of rape or domestic violence cases not being looked at simply because

“how can a man lose to a woman”. True feminism is about being equal, but the term itself has lost a bit of it’s beautiful meaning, to the fact that some people take it too harshly and see everything as men oppressing women.

True equality is very hard to obtain but how can we make it better? When doing thought process to this topic, keep in mind that this goes both ways and try to see all of the angles before drawing a conclusion. Gender equality shouldn’t be a problem in the modern world.

Affirmative Action. Breaking the Glass

Ceiling?By Niko Lammi

on a regular basis and it wasn’t even that long ago when they labelled cafés and such “colored” and “white”. The consequence was that People of Colour where disadvantaged throughout soci-ety. To limit the negative effects, Affirmative Action was brought into effect. Humans have been discriminating each other for a long time, with the most ridicu-lous reasons, how could you ap-ply what we have learned from the past, to the gender question of today? Think widely, think bold-ly, think uniquely.

In the words of Ján Figel’ , the European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth, back in 2007: “In the 21st century, Europe faces a new challenge: how to become an intercultural society, based on a respectful exchange of views between individuals and groups with different cultural backgrounds, on an equal basis. We want to go beyond mul-ticultural societies, where cultures and cultural groups simply coexist side by side: mere tolerance is not enough anymore. We need to give an impulse for a true metamorphosis in our societies, so that we can create an intercultural Europe where cultures exchange and interact constructively, and where there is universal respect for human dignity.”Even though the European Union is highly diverse and most of the multi-religious residents (48 per-cent of them being catholic and the rest – a mix-ture of Protestant, orthodox, Muslim and various other religions) are able to live in harmony, mis-understandings still seem to occur between people of different beliefs, especially when they are cre-ated purposely to disrupt the peace of the Union.

Religious radicalism is on the rise right now and this has been clearly visible since the shootings in Paris in January and the attack in Copenhagen in February occurred. The rise of extremist Muslim organizations outside the EU are jeopardizing the religious freedom and freedom of speech within the European union. An example of such an an or-ganisation is ISIS (Islamic state of Iraq and Syria), which, by march of 2015, already had control of a territory in the Middle East occupied by over ten million people.

Besides being dangerous for organizing and pursuing terrorist attacks within the EU, ISIS is also responsible for recruiting citizens of the EU to join their extremist organi-zation. The problem with preventing these kind of crimes is that it requires to reduce the spread of propaganda about extremist organizations which may affect religious organizations in general by reducing their freedom of speech.

Also, raising the levels of surveillance within communities which may become sourc-es of new extremists may be seen as undemocratic and threaten the members of these communities. For example, professor Francesco Ragazzi of the Leiden university in

By Ugnė Alškaitė

Intercultural Dialogue - Keeping extremism away since 2008

In the words of Ján Figel’ , the European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth, back in 2007: “In the 21st century, Europe faces a new challenge: how to become an intercultural society, based on a respectful exchange of views between individuals and groups with different cultural backgrounds, on an equal basis. We want to go beyond mul-ticultural societies, where cultures and cultural groups simply coexist side by side: mere tolerance is not enough anymore. We need to give an impulse for a true metamorphosis in our societies, so that we can create an intercultural Europe where cultures exchange and interact constructively, and where there is universal respect for human dignity.”

the Netherlands states that “Counter-radicali-sation is operating a mixing of genres between intelligence and policy work on the one hand and social and integration work, on the other. This mix – asking social workers to become intelligence officers and asking police officers to become social workers – is creating a lot of problems”. It causes distrust between religious communities and the authorities. So what CAN be done to eliminate or at least reduce the haz-ard of extremist organizations?

By encouraging intercultural dialogue with programmes and initiatives, which would be active within the European Union we can make sure that the citizens of the EU are capable of understanding the many cultural differences in the region and are able to cooperate in making the EU a safer and more peaceful place. One of these programs is Developing Intercultural

Competence through Education, which focuses on educating teachers to promote the development of intercultural competence as a main concern of mainstream education.

Also, it is important that organizations which are not associated with the government help to strengthen the relations between various cultures. An example of this already being done is Taizé, a monastic community in France, founded in the 1940s. At the time it was created, it served as a way to bring Catholics and Protestants together. Nowadays, worshippers of all religions are welcome to come and spread the word about their beliefs, while learning about other religions. But the question remains – what are new ways to encourage intercultural dialogue?

By Ugnė Alškaitė

Intercultural Dialogue - Keeping extremism away since 2008