Joint Statement by UN human rights experts on the International Day of Older Persons 2026

On the United Nations International Day of Older Persons, we mark a major change in human life. Across the world, more people are reaching older age, and many are living longer than previous generations. While these gains in longevity are far from equally shared, population ageing is a global trend that calls on all countries to adapt to this demographic shift. This year’s theme, “The Age of Longevity: Rethinking Systems for Longer Lives,” invites us to consider what these added years mean for individuals, families and societies, and how human rights can be protected throughout a longer life.

What matters is not only how long people live, but also how they are able to live those years: whether they can continue to make choices, maintain relationships, take part in their communities, exercise their rights and freedoms, learn, work, create, care for others and receive support when they need it. Older persons are no more alike than people at any other stage of life. Many remain active in professional, family, cultural and public life; others live with illness, disability, poverty, displacement, loneliness or a growing need for assistance. The circumstances of older age are varied, but human rights belong equally to all.

Many institutions still approach older age through assumptions of decline, dependency and burden. Chronological age can come to stand in for the individual person, obscuring ability, experience, wishes and aspirations. Age discrimination affects access to work, health services, social protection, housing, justice, digital technologies and public life. The effects of age discrimination can be intensified by multiple forms of discrimination based on additional prohibited grounds, such as gender, disability (including albinism), poverty, race, ethnicity, migration status, political opinion, sexual orientation and gender identity, or membership in other affected groups including peasants and Indigenous Peoples, among others.

Systems designed for longer lives must recognize older persons as equal rights holders and be designed to realize their human rights. They should make it possible for people to remain actively involved in the decisions that shape their lives and their communities.

The responsibility of States to ensure rights-realizing systems for longer lives has practical consequences:

• Where care or support is needed, its purpose should be to enable persons to live according to their own values and choices. The need for assistance does not diminish dignity, personhood, autonomy or rights. Care and support should respect will and preferences, sustain relationships and participation, and never become a reason to remove decision-making from a person solely because of age, diagnosis or disability.
• Health and social services must remain accessible and affordable and include staff trained to identify age-related risks and elder abuse.
• Older persons should have regular and reliable access to adequate, nutritious and culturally appropriate food – without discrimination, and with any support they may require to meet their basic needs. Food insecurity can have particularly serious consequences for older persons, including when poverty, disability, displacement, isolation or health conditions make it harder to obtain, prepare or access food.
• Like all other people, older persons need adequate income, suitable housing, and communities in which they can move safely and remain connected.
• Systems designed for longer lives should also offer continuing opportunities for education, work, and participation in cultural life and public affairs.
• In an increasingly digital world, systems for longer lives should also guarantee older persons’ continued enjoyment of their human rights to freedom of expression, assembly and association. Both digital accessibility and alternatives to digital-by-default participation in society are crucial to ensure older persons are not left behind.
• Older persons should be able to exercise their rights to freedom of opinion and expression, including access to information, on an equal basis with others whether by digital or alternative means.
• Older persons must also be protected from the disproportionate impacts of climate change – including extreme heat, disasters, displacement and other climate-related threats to their health, livelihoods and well-being – and enjoy their right to live in a non-toxic environment.
• Protection from violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation – including contemporary forms of slavery and trafficking in persons – must be effective, and remedies must be available when rights are violated.
• Detained older persons should be treated with dignity and their needs should be taken into account in line with the Nelson Mandela Rules and other international instruments. Potentially unlawful deaths of older persons, which are often overlooked and unpunished, must be fully investigated in accordance with the Minnesota Protocol on the Investigation of Potentially Unlawful Death. Data on such deaths must be collected, and prevention and protection measures prioritized.
• Particular attention should also be paid to older human rights defenders, who often play a vital role in promoting, protecting and defending human rights through their experience, knowledge and long-standing engagement. Nonetheless, older defenders may face compounded risks arising from age-related health conditions, social isolation, harassment, displacement and prolonged legal proceedings.
• Older persons are powerful human rights advocates and agents of change, and their lived experiences, institutional memory and unique perspectives play a vital role in preserving the truth about past violations, transmitting knowledge across generations, and promoting accountability and justice.

In human rights-realizing systems designed for longer lives, older persons must have a real part in shaping the laws, policies and services that concern and affect them. This includes people whose participation may require additional support because of disability (including cognitive, physical or sensory impairments), poverty, diverse living situations, displacement or other circumstances. Consultation may be episodic; yet participation should be meaningful, continuous and built into the structure of the process. Meaningful participation should also include opportunities for inter-generational dialogue and collaboration, strengthening social cohesion, combating age-based stereotypes, and supporting the exchange of knowledge and experience across generations.

The 2026 International Day of Older Persons also falls at an important stage in the development of international human rights law. Work is under way towards an international legally binding instrument on the human rights of older persons. The process offers an opportunity to address longstanding gaps in protection and to give clearer expression to the rights and obligations that apply in older age.

Older persons should participate meaningfully in shaping that instrument from the beginning. Their experience should inform the questions being asked, the standards being drafted and, in time, the way those standards are implemented. An international instrument will have value if it responds to the realities of people’s lives and provides stronger protection where equality, autonomy, dignity and participation are at risk.

Longer lives also change relations between generations. Older persons contribute to families, communities, economies and public life, including in their roles as mentors and transmitters of traditions, in ways that are often taken for granted or made invisible. At the same time, each generation depends upon the knowledge, institutions and forms of solidarity created by those who came before it. Policies for longer lives should therefore be understood as part of the social fabric shared across generations, rather than as measures concerning a separate group.

On this International Day of Older Persons, we call on States and all those whose decisions shape public life to ensure that longer lives are lived with rights intact.

To older persons everywhere, we affirm that your rights do not diminish with age, illness, disability or the need for support. Your voices belong in the decisions that concern your lives and in the societies you have helped to build and continue to shape.