The World Youth Parliament emerged in 1981 as a fruit of a conference given by Fernando Rielo in the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Close to a decade afterward, numerous national and international meetings were held.

The WYP had a definitive worldwide boost in 2008. The following year, in 2009, an international meeting was held in Rome, attended by 400 young adults from 17 different countries. In that year, round table discussions were held and papers presented on topics such as family, work, education, economy, and the environment among others.

In 2010, the young adults representing their country that worked on the year’s theme attended the International Plenary Session held in New York. The “Magna Carta of Values for a New Civilization” is the fruit of the work of this meeting with 500 participants from 20 countries who drafted and presented the final document in the United Nations Headquarters.

In 2011, all countries worked to deepen the topics within the Magna Carta and to disseminate the text among different organizations.

In August 2014 in Berlin, the work that was carried out for years in all the participating countries was presented and the Manifesto “Magna Charta of values in the school of hope” was written.

Since the beginning of 2015 we have been working on the theme “Interpersonal Relations: Keys to a new civilization”, with the first stage from 2015 to 2017 being “A journey called forgiveness.” This first stage of the international plenary session was held in China in August 2017.

After our meeting in China, we have proposed to delve into another subtopic within the section of Interpersonal Relations. From August 2018 to August 2019 we discussed the theme “Peace in Construction: Making decisions together for a new civilization”. This edition culminated in the international plenary session which took place in Salamanca from July 28, 2019, to August 4.

After closely considering forgiveness (Beijing-China 2017) and decision-making (Salamanca-Spain 2019) as two indices of the quality of our interpersonal relationships and pathways towards building peace, in this edition of the World Youth Parliament (WYP) we shall examine the universe of information networks. From August 2020 to August 2022, the WYP will work on “Giving Us a Voice: Reaching the Heights of a New Freedom of Expression”