to human rights, to peace … and beyond! A Welcome Message by the SCORP Director

More than 70 years on from the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human rights are still undermined in various places and settings around the world. With a rapidly developing world and new technologies, challenges to human rights have increased in diversity. For around the same timespan, the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations worked to empower its members in taking their vision and ideas, and making them a reality, with the aim of influencing the transnational inequalities that shape the health of our planet and eventually making an impact on the world.

Today, in a such a dynamic world, the role of youth, as agents of positive change, in creating a better world is crucial. A world in which the human rights of every individual, especially young people, are realized; that ensures every human being is empowered to achieve their full potential.

At the dawn of a new decade, we come together to deliver to SCORP’s ambitious, but also very direct, vision: ‘to achieve a peaceful world where all individuals are entitled to full and equal access to their human rights, where no one is left behind, where priority is given to people in greatest need and where the entire society, including medical students and health workers, unite to support vulnerable groups’. We come together to continue delivering to our mission of ‘empowering and motivating medical students to actively promote and protect human rights and peace through advocacy, capacity building, and awareness raising, as well as by supporting the students in carrying out activities and projects’.

We come together to reflect on the development of SCORP over the past decade, but

also to start a new decade filled with new needs and challenges to address, new perspective to reflect on, and new goals to achieve! We come together to solidify the basis for the upcoming generations of SCORPions to build their work on and to continue the development of the Standing Committee.

For that to be achieved, and as we go into the March Meeting, we aim to work together to upgrade the quality of our work, increase our impact and take our advocacy one more step forward. Over the years, huge efforts have been put on to ensure that our members are empowered and well equipped with skills; that our advocacy and participation is meaningful; and that our words are turned into impact. However, we need to build upon those efforts and live up to the present needs and challenges. We look to you to inform, influence, advocate; mobilize and leverage; showcase; and contribute to this vision, of stepping up youth’s efforts towards meaningful and impactful effect. Even more, we count on you, SCORPions, to turn the promise of SCORP into concrete actions.

The world is so vulnerable, facing a wide variety of crises and human rights violation. Awareness and discussions alone may not solve deep rooted problems. But SCORPions working together, hand in hand, even if miles apart, can co-create and pave the way for change. Let us share our ideas and good practices; learn from each other; and support each other to participate meaningfully, to make an impact, to human rights, to peace … and beyond! `

Mahmood Al-Hamody SCORP Director 2019/2020