Statement to the Third Committee of the United Nations General Assembly
Delivered by Ms. Satara Uthayakumaran, 2025 Australian Youth Representative to the United Nations
9 October 2025
Chair and Honourable Delegates,
I acknowledge that we are gathering on the lands of the Lenape people and pay my respects. From across the oceans, I also honour the First Nations peoples of Australia – the first diplomats and defenders of human rights.
I address you today as Australia’s Youth Delegate to the United Nations. Having spent the past year travelling across our nation’s 7.7 million square kilometres, I have the privilege of carrying the voices, dreams and experiences of thousands of young Australians into this room.
I’ve sat with children as young as ten locked up in detention. I’ve spoken to kids in refugee centres drowning in bureaucracy. And I’ve met children with disabilities struggling to be heard because no one can understand the languages they use. These issues are not isolated, nor specific to Australia – they are global, interconnected and contemporary challenges facing youth around the world.
But I’d like to begin by bringing into the heart of the UN, these words, from a youth detention centre in Australia:
“We’re not just what we’ve done. We’re still sons, brothers, friends. Some of us are artists, some are cooks, some write music. But when we’re locked up, people stop seeing us as human.”
Children should never have to convince the world that they are human.
I carry forward the wide-ranging concerns of young people from my country and region. But among the issues I have heard, two stand out.
Firstly, youth in our region - the Asia-Pacific - are on the frontlines of climate devastation. Indigenous children and those across the Pacific are already experiencing the brutal impact of a warming world - their homes and futures under threat of being swept away by rising seas. Our country’s connection to the Pacific is more than geographic - it is familial. The rising tide is not a metaphor for us; it is the lived reality of our neighbours and kin whose human rights – including with respect to land, culture, and identity – are under threat.
Secondly, young people in Australia are deeply concerned by the prevalence and treatment of children in the criminal justice system. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is clear: detention must only ever be a measure of last resort. Yet it occurs all too often. Each year 261 000 children are incarcerated globally. We must find another way - to raise the age of criminal responsibility, and to invest in community-led care that restores rather than punishes, that helps children heal, rebuild and belong.
The UN exists to serve the marginalised - and if those it was built to protect do not know it exists, then it has lost its way.
The 2030 Agenda is a promise to every child around the world - you are seen, you are heard, and you matter.
So, I’ll end by reminding us who I am speaking for, and who the UN was built to serve - the schools where children dream, the farms where families toil, the detention centres where hope fights to survive, the town camps where culture and strength endure, and the communities carrying the weight of the future.
Thank you.