New milestone for older people’s rights reached at UN General Assembly
Published on 15 August 2024 04:14 PM
The UN General Assembly has recognised that there are gaps in the protection of older people’s rights and that more needs to be done to address them. This week it voted to conclude the work of a group in New York looking at these issues and asked all relevant UN Agencies, including the Human Rights Council, to consider the recommendations that came out of the Group.
Below, our Policy Lead Ken Bluestone explains why this is an important milestone and what must come next:
On Tuesday 13 August 2024, the United Nations (UN) took an important step on the journey to better protecting older people’s rights. Fourteen years after the UN General Assembly asked its Members to convene an Open-Ended Working Group on Ageing (OEWGA) for the purpose of strengthening the protection of the human rights of older persons, a General Assembly resolution concluded that the Working Group had fulfilled its mandate.
This does not mean that the protection of older people’s rights is sorted, far from it. Over the course of its 14 sessions, the OEWGA received hundreds of pieces of evidence documenting the severity with which older people’s rights were being undermined globally. It also uncovered gaps in the way that existing international, regional and national legal frameworks are supposed to protect these rights. The existence of these gaps, as well as the need for responding to them, was agreed by UN Member States at the 14th Session of the OEWGA.
There is an urgent need to take the discussions started by the OEWGA to the next level. What is needed now is an international human rights convention that will help governments, civil society and human rights organisations, UN agencies and other international stakeholders, older people themselves, and society as a whole to understand how the rights of older people can be better protected.
The question is, how should this work be taken forward? For many, the UN’s Human Rights Council based in Geneva is the best place to help governments come together with older people, civil society organisations working with older people, human rights institutions and experts to craft the language that would go into a new Convention.
We need governments across the globe to state unequivocally that older people should fully enjoy their human rights equally alongside others in society. So, Age International urges members of the Human Rights Council to embrace the recommendation put forward by the OEWGA that a Human Rights Convention for Older Persons is necessary to better protect the rights of older people.
We also urge the UK Government to be first in line for championing the creation of this Convention.