Details of the Eleventh OEWG Session

The eleventh session of the UN Open-Ended Working Group on Ageing (OEWG) will take place between 6th and 9th April 2020 in the United Nations Headquarters in New York. In this eleventh session, UN Member States will once again hold substantive discussions about specific areas of human rights where the protection of older people’s rights requires greater attention.

Focus areas of rights

These substantive debates will include further discussion around how the two focus areas discussed in the tenth session of the OEWG should be articulated in a new convention (‘normative inputs’):

  • Social protection and social security, including social protection floors
  • Education, training, lifelong learning and capacity-building

The eleventh session will also include substantive debate around two new focus areas:

  • Access to justice
  • The right to work and access to the labour market

The UN has called for written submissions on the above focus areas by 31st October 2019. All governments, A-status National Human Rights Institutes and accredited NGOs can submit written inputs. Inputs must be in English and of no more than 800 words per focus area. Further details will be available on the official OEWG website soon. You can access the UN’s guiding questions on each of the focus areas below:

To support our members’ work on these focus areas, GAROP has organised two webinars in partnership with the International Federation on Ageing to focus on the two new focus areas to be discussed at the eleventh session. The webinar on ‘Access to justice in older age’ took place on 22nd August and you can now view and summary and listen to the recording of the webinar here. The webinar on ‘The right to work and access to the labour market in older age’ will take place on 5th September and you can find out more and register here.

GAROP members are also leading two Technical Groups working to develop suggested normative content on the other focus areas of education and social protection. If you are a GAROP member and would like to join one or both of these groups, please contact the GAROP Secretariat on ‘info@rightsofolderpeople.org‘ for more information in the first instance.

GAROP and the IFA also hosted a webinar in July that presented HelpAge’s F.A.I.R. Guidelines, which provide a step-by-step guide on how to influence your government’ position on a convention. The recording of the webinar and links to access the F.A.I.R. Guidelines in English, Spanish, Russian and Arabic are now available here.