The Soros-funded media platform, openDemocracy, has taken credit for initiating the review that froze World Youth Alliance grant funds by the European Commission.
In an article published November 18, 2025, openDemocracy claims that the World Youth Alliance is set to lose its European Union funding after openDemocracy revealed it won a reproductive health grant despite “abortion disinformation.”
Last October, openDemocracy published an article: “EU criticised for ‘mind-boggling’ decision to give the World Youth Alliance funding” writing that they asked the European Commission to look into funding to WYA and the Commission had agreed to “…carry out an analysis to assess whether there has been a breach of the grant agreement for non-compliance with EU values or grave professional misconduct.”
It was Neil Datta, Executive Director of the European Parliamentary Forum of Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF), who provided the ‘mind-boggling’ quote to openDemocracy and in that same article, criticized the Commission, urging them to withdraw the WYA grants:
“That the European Commission is providing €400,000 to WYA for a reproductive health programme raises serious questions about the Commission’s professional capacity to understand what reproductive health is, which in turn calls into question all EU funding reported as reproductive health or sexual and reproductive health and rights…If the Commission is serious in its political support for sexual and reproductive health and rights, it urgently needs to step up its capacity in this area so that it doesn’t make similar blunders in the future.”
This November, WYA received three project review letters accusing the organization of not upholding “EU values”. The letters specifically noted that the grants did not fail in any technical or implementation capacities. The entire grant process review, as indicated by the Commission, is related to the question of promoting “EU values”.
To be clear: the grants that WYA received were for three projects: Women’s Health Goes Digital (WHGD), Youth Act 2024 (YA2024) and a WYA Europe Operating grant 2024 (OG2024). Not one of these grants was linked to the issue of abortion. Further, no European Treaties enshrine abortion in European law or human rights. On the contrary, European treaties and documentation specifically recognize that abortion is a matter for member States and that the European Union as an institution has no jurisdiction over this issue.
It also should be noted that the “concerned MEPs” named in openDemocracy’s December 2024 article, “MEPs demand answers over EU funding of anti-abortion charity” – Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus, Krzysztof Śmiszek, Maria Noichl, Lucia Yar, and Hanna Gedin – and who wrote to the Commission about the “risks of the WYA misleading young people” due to its history of “allegedly disseminating information on sexual and reproductive rights that is fundamentally at odds with EU values” are all members of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights working group, as pictured on the EPF website.
EPF, despite its neutered acronym, is not a neutral NGO. The European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights is not a neutral NGO. EPF is an initiative of International Planned Parenthood Federation European Network (IPPF EN). Neil Datta, the Executive Director of EPF, was the former Parliamentary Programme Officer for International Planned Parenthood Federation European Network (IPPF-EN).
openDemocracy and the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights have a history of collaboration. Neil Datta himself writes for openDemocracy and the openDemocracy writer who most closely follows the work of World Youth Alliance, Sian Norris, has been a guest panelist at EPF events.
This June, the EPF published its own report, The Next Wave, which is said to expose the $1.8 billion dollars in funding from 2019-2023 for “anti-gender” NGOs, political parties, and public institutions.
By comparison, IPPF European Network, as part of an organized consortium of 15 organizations, welcomed 2.8 billion Euro in EU funding in 2022 alone, with the ungrateful caption: “Funding for sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR): are we doing enough?”
The EPF Next Wave report names World Youth Alliance ninety-one times and breathlessly claims World Youth Alliance spent over 2 million, over the course of four years (2019-2023), which amounts to roughly six hundred thousand a year. The EPF, a Brussels-based “network of Members of Parliament throughout Europe…both at home and overseas,” boasts a $2.3 million yearly budget funded by International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the Gates Foundation, Countdown 2030, and gives thanks to its pharmaceutical sponsors Merck & Co. (MSD), Organon, and Ferring.
While openDemocracy claims victory for triggering the current European Commission investigation of WYA, IPPF EN brags about influencing the European Commission to allocate more funding for abortion and contraception:
“Throughout the year, we continued to call on the EU to prioritise SRHR (sexual and reproductive health and rights) and gender equality in its funding for external action, actively engaging in the mid-term review of the principal financing instrument for development and international cooperation, the NDICI, and publishing key analysis of EU bilateral aid going to SRHR.”
The principal financing instrument NDICI-Global Europe earmarked €79.46 billion for 2021-2027.
Meanwhile, the EPF MEPs or SRR (sexual and reproductive rights) lobbied for mechanisms to “protect citizens from anti-gender pushback” and against “anti-choice networks” while continuing to push for the enforcement of “binding EU ODA targets and binding EU ODA targets for gender equality.” Read: even more money.
The threat at the heart of the European Institutions is not the World Youth Alliance, a small, grassroots youth organization that has received European grants and spent them well and fairly on activities to engage young people in human rights discussions across Europe. The threat is organizations funded by billionaires and pharma giants lobbying the European Institutions on the inside, seemingly with the power to influence who receives grants and who doesn’t.
Democracy, they say, dies in darkness. openDemocracy and EPF have manipulated the European Commission and related processes for too long. This is the true threat to democracy in Europe, and the true exposé of those who do not share EU values. In their glee to harm one small grassroots NGO, they have unwittingly exposed their own nefarious network of corporate funding, access, privilege and insider power.
