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The UN Intergovernmental Working Group on the Human Rights of Older Persons (IGWG) is working on a treaty on the rights of older persons. The first session was held in July in Geneva, and the negotiations will last at least two years.

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The written consultations drew 202 submissions from states and organizations. Poland did not submit a position; among those that did were Germany, France and Austria.

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A delegate of the Americas network of national human rights institutions called for the treaty to cover “sexual and reproductive rights” and the “right to die with dignity” for older persons.

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Criticism of euthanasia and assisted-suicide legislation is growing in Europe: France and the United Kingdom face allegations of insufficient safeguards, and Canada, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands — allegations of abuse.

A new UN treaty on the rights of older persons

The UN Intergovernmental Working Group on the Human Rights of Older Persons (IGWG) is working on a treaty concerning the rights of older persons. The body launched consultations on the matter, in the course of which — as the Working Group’s chair, the Argentine diplomat Carlos Mario Foradori, reported — 202 submissions were received by June 24 from states, UN bodies, national human rights institutions, civil society organizations and academia. This was followed by the first substantive session of the IGWG, held on July 13–17 at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. The next session is scheduled for October 26–28, 2026, and the negotiations themselves are expected to last at least two years. The Working Group itself was established by UN Human Rights Council resolution 58/13 in order to draft an international treaty and submit it to the Human Rights Council.

The written consultations, the full list of submissions to which is published by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, concerned the general framework, architecture and guiding principles of the future treaty. The submissions received came from governments (Poland is not on the list; those that responded include Germany, France, Austria, the Czech Republic and Croatia), from national human rights institutions and from non-governmental organizations working on behalf of older persons, as well as from organizations clearly identified with the conservative current in international law, among them Alliance Defending Freedom International.

“Sexual and reproductive rights” and the “right to die with dignity”

At the session’s second meeting, a representative of the Americas Network of National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs), speaking on behalf of the region’s institutions coordinated by Guatemala, pointed to the need to “mainstream additional rights such as food security, sexual and reproductive rights, and the right to die with dignity” as elements of the future treaty. Earlier in its statement, the same network stressed that although the situation differs from country to country, the problems facing the region’s older residents are similar. Citing the lack of equality and systemic violence, the organization argued that resolving them requires common international protective standards.

While the call to have the treaty cover so-called reproductive rights in their broader sense is nothing new in the discourse of international organizations, pairing it with the “right to die with dignity” in the context of a treaty on older persons is a particular cause for concern — given that the future instrument is to be addressed precisely to older persons, that is, to the group most exposed to abuse in systems that permit euthanasia or assisted suicide.

The European context: euthanasia under growing criticism

The treaty negotiations are taking place against the backdrop of an intense public debate on end-of-life law in several European countries. In France, the recently enacted law legalizing “aid in dying” has been criticized for failing to provide sufficient safeguards for persons with disabilities, the elderly and those with mental disorders. In the United Kingdom, the governing Labour Party attempted last year to pass a euthanasia bill, which stalled in Parliament after opposition from groups working on behalf of persons with disabilities. At the same time, countries where euthanasia is already legal — including Canada, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands — face mounting criticism for permitting assisted suicide for (de facto) children, older persons and persons with disabilities, as well as for people diagnosed with depression alone.

The term “death with dignity” is used in two contradictory senses, which in practice produces far-reaching terminological ambiguity in the discussions under way at the UN. Advocates of legalizing assisted suicide use it to denote that very practice, while part of the palliative medicine community — including the International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care (IAHPC) in its official position statement of 2017 — reserves the term exclusively for death that follows palliative care relieving pain at the bedside of a terminally ill patient, regardless of whether euthanasia is legal in a given country.

The treaty’s future in question

Organizations working on behalf of persons with disabilities, which in principle support the creation of a new treaty as a tool strengthening protection against age discrimination, expressly stipulate that any provisions on “medical assistance in dying” should rest solely on the objective fact that a given person is dying, and never on disability or advanced age as such. Work on the treaty will continue at the Working Group’s next session, scheduled for October 26–28 in Geneva.

“The Working Group’s first session on the treaty is a good illustration of a mechanism we have been observing for years in other UN treaty processes: states negotiate the text narrowly, on the basis of a real consensus, while non-governmental organizations and national human rights institutions — financed, be it noted, largely by the European Union — use the public consultations to introduce into the debate concepts that no state has ever agreed to in a treaty. The ‘right to die with dignity’ next to ‘sexual and reproductive rights’ in a single sentence is no rhetorical accident. It is the same set of slogans that has been circulating through UN policy documents for a decade regardless of the topic of the session, whether it concerns women, refugees or, as here, older persons. The difference is that this time the terminology is to be addressed to the people most exposed to abuse by euthanasia systems, and that is no longer a dispute about vocabulary but about whether advanced age will one day become sufficient grounds for ending a life. The negotiations will last at least two years, and what today looks like a single sentence in the statement of a single network of institutions may return in a few years as an established standard invoked by treaty bodies against states that never formally agreed to it,” notes Julia Książek of the Ordo Iuris Center for International Law.

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