November 18, 2025
The Harvard Law School Project on Disability, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School (PFC) and the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior (CLBB)
Tuesday, November 18, 2025, 12:20 p.m.
A panel discussion of how participants in the incipient older persons treaty negotiations can both build on recent advances in international human rights law while also avoiding pitfalls in translating these rights into reality.
On April 3, 2025, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council adopted a resolution jumpstarting the multilateral process for negotiating a new international treaty on the rights of older persons. Like the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) before it, this treaty will aim to close critical gaps in international human rights legal protections for a population that disproportionately experiences discrimination, marginalization, and exclusion. Indeed, as demonstrated by the 14 years of deliberations by the UN Open-Ended Working Group on Ageing, the many overlapping human rights challenges faced by both persons with disabilities and older persons make lessons learned from the CRPD negotiations especially relevant to forging new protections for older persons.
This event's panelists will assess the prospects for negotiators to capitalize on this progress, particularly with regard to the successes and challenges manifest during the first two decades of CRPD implementation, given the significant overlaps between the global disability and aging communities.
Live CART captioning provided.
Welcoming Remarks
- Susannah Baruch, Executive Director, PFC
Moderator
- Professor Michael Stein, Executive Director, HPOD
Panelists
- Dr. Alejandro Bonilla García, Chair, NGO Committee on Ageing (Geneva)
- H.E. Luis Gallegos, Senior Advisor, HPOD
- Professor Jody Heymann, Founding Director, WORLD Policy Analysis Center, UCLA
- Ms. Silvia Perel-Levin, Independent consultant on ageing, health and human rights of older persons
Concluding Remarks
- Robert Kinscherff, Executive Director, CLBB
