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The report “Violence against older women,” prepared by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, directly defends older women’s right to spaces reserved for them in care facilities and criticizes euthanasia and assisted suicide as a form of violence against the most vulnerable.

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The document criticizes laws based on “gender self-identification” as disregarding the biological differences between women and men.

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A significant part of the report is devoted to a critical analysis of euthanasia and assisted suicide practices affecting older women, noting, among other things, that in the United Kingdom as many as 78% of the victims of so-called “mercy” killings were not terminally ill but merely disabled, elderly, or infirm.

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The Ordo Iuris Center for International Law has prepared an extensive analysis of the document, commending its accurate diagnoses while also pointing to the risks associated with the call for a new, binding UN treaty on the rights of older persons and with the very broad definition of “violence” it adopts.

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The report of the UN Special Rapporteur

The UN Secretary-General has transmitted to the General Assembly report A/81/133, titled “Violence against older women.” The document was prepared by Reem Alsalem, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences. The report was submitted under the agenda item “Advancement of women.” It was drawn up on the basis of 108 submissions sent in response to a call for input (including 20 from States), as well as consultations with 58 experts.

The report cites demographic data illustrating the scale of the phenomenon: the number of women aged 60 and over was estimated at 664 million in 2025, with a projected increase to 1.13 billion by 2050. Women already account for 54% of people over 60 and 62% of people over 80 — a phenomenon the document describes as the “feminization of aging.”

Women have a right to spaces reserved for them

The most significant element of the report is a section criticizing laws that permit “gender self-identification” as a flawed approach that erroneously distinguishes between a person’s actual biological sex and their “gender identity” and disregards the differences between women and men — something said to be especially problematic in long-term care facilities. The Special Rapporteur points out that older women often have no enforceable right to refuse intimate personal care from men who identify as women, which can be re-traumatizing for victims of sexual violence. The consequence of this finding is a recommendation calling on States to guarantee older women access to spaces reserved for them, particularly in institutional facilities.

As the Ordo Iuris Center for International Law emphasizes in its analysis, statements about the conflict between rights grounded in biological sex and gender self-identification policies appear rarely in official UN documents, and only exceptionally in such an unequivocal form. This position is consistent with the one Ordo Iuris has presented for years in the national and international debate over the legal definition of sex.

Euthanasia as a form of violence, not an expression of autonomy

The report’s second major theme is a critical analysis of euthanasia and assisted suicide practices. The document notes that neglect of health care and palliative care can make older women feel pressured to agree more readily to euthanasia, whose normalization threatens to entrench the harmful belief that people requiring greater care are of lesser value. The report documents cases in which the killing of an older woman was justified by a desire to “end suffering,” even though — as the cited British data show — the vast majority (78%) of the victims of such killings were not terminally ill. The Rapporteur also notes that women make up 69–77% of cases of so-called psychiatric euthanasia, and that data from Ontario indicate that 47% of those requesting euthanasia gave the fear of being a burden on their family as one of the main reasons.

The Ordo Iuris Center for International Law observes that this is a rare instance in which an official report by a UN special mandate on women’s rights advances such a clear thesis: that normalizing and expanding access to euthanasia is not progress in protecting women’s autonomy but may instead be a form of violence against them. This position fully aligns with Ordo Iuris’s advocacy for the development of palliative care as an alternative to legalizing and expanding access to euthanasia.

A new UN treaty and Ordo Iuris’s reservations

In its recommendations, the report calls on States to support work on a new, legally binding UN treaty on the rights of older persons, being conducted by an intergovernmental working group established by Human Rights Council resolution 58/13. In doing so, the document adopts a very broad understanding of “violence,” encompassing, among other things, austerity policy, State debt, and unilateral coercive measures such as United States sanctions against Cuba.

The Ordo Iuris Center for International Law’s analysis indicates that, from the perspective of the principle of subsidiarity and State sovereignty, this part of the report deserves particular attention: regional instruments such as the Inter-American Convention on Protecting the Human Rights of Older Persons and the African Protocol on the Rights of Older Persons show that the protection of this group can be effectively regulated at a level adapted to local legal and cultural systems, without the need to create a new universal treaty.

“The UN Special Rapporteur’s report deserves careful reading not only because of the gravity of the problem of violence against older women, but above all because it is rare for an official UN document devoted to women’s rights to defend so clearly the importance of biological sex for women’s safety in care facilities, and to name euthanasia and assisted suicide so openly as a threat to the most vulnerable rather than an expression of their autonomy. These are positions that the Ordo Iuris Center for International Law has long and consistently advocated,” emphasizes Julia Książek, an analyst at Ordo Iuris.

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Source of cover photo: iStock