Participation in Public Life and Decision-Making Processes

Intervention of the Australian Human Rights Commission to 14th session of the UN Open-Ended Working Group on Ageing 

23 May 2024, Wednesday, 3:00-4:30PM

Agenda Item 6

Focus Area: Participation in Public Life and Decision-Making Processes

Address by Age Discrimination Commissioner Robert Fitzgerald

Thank you, Moderator, distinguished delegates and participants and, after yesterday’s decision - friends.

As the very new Age Discrimination Commissioner with the Australian Human Rights Commission, it has been an honour to participate in these discussions with my Civil Society colleagues especially from Australia and fellow National Human Rights Institutions.

I thank today’s panel that tackles one of the most important yet most vulnerable areas of concern for older people. Despite some important initiatives outlined by the panellist, this panel demonstrates conclusively the inadequacy of current human rights mechanisms in protecting the right of older persons to fully participate:

• in decisions that affect them personally; and 
• in their right to participate in the design and implementation of systems and services that affect their daily lives including health, aged care, housing and other social services. 

Their right to participate in our global and domestic responses to climate change and advances in technology are no less important.

Without robust human rights frameworks the right to participation remains solely at the discretion or goodwill of governments, bureaucracies and service providers. Many of whom are infected with ageist attitudes that fail to recognise the capacity and rights of people to be active participants in the decisions that affect them. 

For older women, for older Indigenous peoples, for older people from culturally diverse minorities, this challenge of participation becomes even more difficult and sometimes more dangerous. 

To the panel, how do we empower such groups without the foundations of an international binding treaty?

In Australia we are increasingly attentive to the needs of older persons, including those with cognitive decline, to have the right to be involved in all decisions that affect them. To do so we need to provide adequate support to aid in decision making, reconsider our approach to guardianship and redefine legal capacity. 

An even greater challenge is the need to truly listen to and engage with older people in the design of supports and service systems that they will need as they age.

We have heard that older people become invisible. Even worse they become voiceless. It is not that older persons have nothing to say. They have plenty to say. It is simply that too few are willing to listen. It is as if they are relegated to being onlookers. Onlookers in their own lives. Onlookers in Society. 

Our collective role, especially National Human Rights Institutions, is to give voice and presence to older people. It is to allow older people, especially the most marginalised, to fully participate in their own lives and the society in which they live.

And this my friends can only truly be achieved if we do everything to strengthen our international and national human rights frameworks for older persons. 

We now need to take all the steps necessary to move to a genuinely binding Convention. 

We urge the General Assembly to act quickly in the progress of this and, as a sign of the United Nations’ genuine commitment to the participation of older people, to ensure that the engagement of older people and their Civil Society organisations are present and engaged at all stages of the next process. 

This will challenge the United Nations. It will challenge the United Nations to see whether it truly believes in the participation of those who are affected by one of the biggest decisions it will make in relation to older persons. 

Thank you and age well.