A Convention Is Only the Beginning
- Dr. Jane Barratt
- 9 hours ago
- 2 min read
By Dr. Jane Barratt
What nineteen years of disability rights advocacy reveal about making a UN convention on the rights of older people matter
I haven’t been close to disability rights work for more than ten years now. But I was, once, and I still watch it from the side lines the way you watch a sport you used to play. I notice things others may not.
So when I read the International Disability Alliance’s latest annual report, I wasn’t looking at it as news. I was looking at it as a nineteen-year-old experiment finally showing its results. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was adopted in 2006. There’s now a real, visible movement of Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (OPD) sitting in rooms at the UN Human Rights Council, briefing the Security Council on Sudan, shaping the outcome document of a G20 summit, contesting the wording of humanitarian reform. That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because a generation of advocates fought, slowly and unglamorously, to turn a piece of paper into a seat at the table.
There’s now serious momentum toward a UN convention on the rights of older people. It is overdue. Those who believe in this convention would do well to sit with this report for an afternoon, because it’s basically a field report on what nineteen years of “we have a convention now” actually looks like in practice. Some of it is inspiring. Some of it should worry them as it does me.
Here’s the encouraging part.
A convention doesn’t just create rights on paper. It creates a mechanism.
The disability movement now has a treaty body that governments have to answer to, a system of national reporting that forces uncomfortable questions and crucially, organisations that were built specifically to hold all of it accountable. IDA didn’t just show up to conferences in 2025. It helped write the language, briefed the negotiators beforehand, and then handed the resulting commitments back to its members to use as leverage at home.
That loop from lived experience to global standard and back to national pressure is the whole game. Without it, a convention is just a nice speech.
Dr. Jane Barratt is an internationally recognized advisor and non-executive leader with more than three decades of experience in global ageing, health, and social policy and practice.
She has worked with the World Health Organization, the United Nations, governments, academic institutions, industry, and civil-society partners to strengthen health systems and advance the rights and well-being of older people worldwide.
Recognized globally for clarity and authority, her leadership has helped shape public-health agendas and embed dignity and equity at the centre of ageing policy and practice.
Her perspective has been shaped by years inside the rooms where decisions are made and change is resisted. She writes and speaks about what it takes to lead with courage in complex systems — connecting evidence with humanity, and strategy with purpose. Her work bridges policy and practice, insight and action, reminding us that ageing is not a crisis to manage but a lens through which we see who we are.
You can follow Dr. Barratt on her Substack The Arc of Ageing