The European Youth Parliament was founded in 1987, when an International Session was first held in Fontainebleau, France. Ever since the EYP has organised sessions all over Europe and risen to a well-known NGO. The amount of delegates at a session has risen, and especially the number of participating countries (particularly from former Eastern-Block countries). By summer 2010, the EYP has organised a total of 64 International sessions.
Over the years, the selection process in EYP countries has changed, and more and more countries organise selection conferences to select their representatives to EYP sessions. Whereas in the first years of EYP, teachers played the central role in national committees, nowadays students (former delegates) are leading many national committees.
In the past years, EYP has become less centralised from the organisation’s former headquarters in Oxford (now in Berlin), since national committees have started organising their own regional sessions, which means that EYP nowadays does not organise merely three international sessions every year, but many more session, which are organised by the national committees and involve young people from all over Europe.