Ireland has backed a Norwegian motion in favour of transsexual rights at a UN conference on teenage health being held in New York.

The paragraph proposed by Norway expresses “grave concern regarding the acts of violence and discrimination, in all regions of the world, committed against individuals because of their sexual orientation and gender identity”.

The conference, held by the UN’s Commission on Population and Development, is entitled Adolescents and Health.

However, observers say that the conference has focused disproportionately on sexual and reproductive issues including controversial forms of sex education for adolescents.

According to the US blog, Turtle Bay and Beyond, which focuses on U.N. news, the opening remarks of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon “stressed the need to provide reproductive health care for adolescents and youth”.

It said: “A new report by the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) included calls for urgent action to ‘protect young people’s right to sexual and reproductive health’. The report “highlights the need to give millions of girls access to reproductive health services to avoid unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and sexually transmitted infections.”

The conference was supposed to address a wide range of topics related to population, development and youth.

Observers have complained that the focus at the conference on sex and sexualising youth has led to issues such education, unemployment and health care have being ignored.

Timothy Herrmann, who is a UN observer for C-Fam, which defends family values at a UN level, says that the discussions this week on teenage health have ignored a crucial UN declaration on the right to development, drafted in 1986.

The declaration talks about “equality of opportunity for all in their access to basic resources, education, health services, food, housing, employment and the fair distribution of income”.

However, Hermann says, “such language is almost entirely absent in the draft document being discussed at the conference”.

He says: “Instead, the document currently contains over 83 different references to Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights as well 27 references to abortion, far outweighing any references to the real development concerns of youth previously mentioned.

“Most of these references have been proposed and supported by countries like the U.S. and Norway along with other ‘like minded countries’ generally coming from Europe but not excluding countries like Uruguay and Argentina.

Some delegations have criticised the conference. Delegations from the Holy See, Swaziland and Egypt have expressed their concern about the emphasis with the “sexual rights of youth”.

They have argued that this focus has distracted attention from issues such as education and economic development.