By Katherine Pettus, PhD Senior Advocacy Director IAHPC. On October 7, 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) adopted Resolution 48/3 entitled simply “Human Rights of Older Persons.”
I was thrilled to see “palliative care,” usually absent from high level UN documents, referenced four times in the text, twice in the preambular paragraphs – acknowledging the challenging of accessing services – and twice in the operational paragraphs, calling upon member states to “adopt and implement non-discriminatory policies, national strategies, action plans, legislation and regulations…” to help people access it.
The resolution also calls out ageism, a significant barrier for older persons’ access, as Judith Graham’s article in the October issue of Ehospice shows.
This unprecedented recognition of palliative care by the Human Rights Council, and the associated directives to member states, have been a long time coming, especially in the glaring light shed by the pandemic on policy and service gaps.
This unprecedented recognition of palliative care by the Human Rights Council, and the associated directives to member states, have been a long time coming, especially in the glaring light shed by the pandemic on policy and service gaps.
It has been part of a multi-year advocacy strategy led by global and regional NGOs advocating for the many as yet unnamed and unprotected rights of older persons. IAHPC played a small part of this effort to include palliative care, first led by Human Rights Watch in the early 2010’s.