On April 3, 2025, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council adopted a resolution jumpstarting the multilateral process for negotiating a new international treaty on the rights of older persons. The landmark resolution marks the culmination of three decades of governmental and civil society progress, as the world races to meet the far-reaching challenges posed by its rapidly aging population amid the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing (2021-2030). Like the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) before it, this treaty will aim to close critical gaps in international human rights legal protections for a population that disproportionately experiences discrimination, marginalization, and exclusion. Indeed, as demonstrated by the 14 years of deliberations by the UN Open-Ended Working Group on Ageing, the many overlapping human rights challenges faced by both persons with disabilities and older persons make lessons learned from the CRPD negotiations especially relevant to forging new protections for older persons.

This HPOD event, co-organized with the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School (PFC) and the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior (CLBB), will explore how participants in the incipient older persons treaty negotiations can both build on the notable innovations of the CRPD and also avoid certain pitfalls that have manifested during the first two decades of CRPD implementation.

Live CART captioning provided.

Welcoming Remarks

•    Susannah Baruch, Executive Director, PFC

Moderator

•    Hezzy Smith, Director of Advocacy Initiatives, HPOD

Panelists

•    Alejandro Bonilla García, Chair, NGO Committee on Ageing (Geneva)
•    H.E. Luis Gallegos, Senior Advisor, HPOD
•    Professor Jody Heymann, Founding Director, WORLD Policy Analysis Center, UCLA
•    Silvia Perel-Levin, Independent consultant on ageing, health and human rights of older persons 

Concluding Remarks

•    Robert Kinscherff, Executive Director, Center for Law, Brain & Behavior