Manushya Foundation submitted a report titled, “Silencing a Generation: Youth power, the Milk Tea Alliance, and the rise of age-gating laws in Asia-Pacific”, in response to the call for input by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association for the UNGA 81st thematic report on “Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association Youth Activism Report: Gen-Z Activism and the Future of Civic Space”.

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This submission draws on Manushya Foundation’s work across Asia and examines emerging threats to youth civic participation, including age-gating laws, digital repression, transnational repression, the criminalisation of youth dissent, and the growing importance of digitally native forms of organising and regional solidarity, including the Milk Tea Alliance.

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Every generation is shaped by its defining crisis. If the Baby Boomer generation was forged by the remnants of the Second World War, Gen X by the fall of the Soviet Union, and Millennials by the war on terror and the Arab Spring, then Gen Z and Gen Alpha have inherited something far more unforgiving: a world on the brink of ecological collapse, information warfare, AI disruption, and a mental health crisis with no infrastructure to meet it.

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The youth of today deserve our full support and imagination. What they have received instead is a moral panic about social media, one that steers the conversation away from the structural failures of housing, climate, economic inequality, and democratic exclusion, and onto the devices in young people's hands.

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We will be direct about what we demand.

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The United Nations must state without qualification that blanket restrictions on young people's access to digital space are incompatible with the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and association. It must revise its guidance on children's online safety to strip out every conditional endorsement of age-restriction frameworks that governments will quote selectively to justify the next crackdown. And it must build a binding, funded, enforceable mechanism that transfers real decision-making power to young people, beginning with those from working-class, racialised, and Indigenous communities who carry the heaviest cost of policies made without them. None of this requires a new framework or another working group. It requires political will, which has been absent from our institutions for so long that its absence now passes for normal.

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This generation did not inherit a broken world by accident. It was broken for them, deliberately and profitably. The least we owe them is the freedom to fight for something better without being shot, jailed, or scrolled out of existence.