Rational Construction Of The UN Convention On The Rights Of The Elderly

In the 20th century, great changes have taken place in life expectancy. The 21st century is experiencing a rapidly growing of global population. Smaller family size and life extension, meanwhile, are making the world’s population age distribution from youth to old age. Aging population has become a global problem. An aging society means that the social labor population decline, as well as the labor productivity, posing challenges to the development of social economy. Aging process, if the labour growth slows, coupled with the increased demands of health care spending, which is associated with slower economic growth. Therefore, the correlation of aging in all over the world attaches great importance to the aging problems, changes the public attitude, policies and practices, so as to exert the potential of old people, and enhance their ability to participate in family and community life itself, as well as in the society as the full rights of citizen, and to ensure security and dignity to enter old age. The complexity and multiplicity of the role of the elderly requirements that the world can no longer consider aging as just the old problems of them own.However, the older people are facing unique challenges on the realization of rights; these challenges which interfere with the old people’s social, economic and cultural participation are shared by all or most of the area in the world. As the world’s largest and the most influential universal inter-governmental organizations, maintaining and promoting human rights is one of the fundamental purpose and the principles. Norm of the United Nations human rights protection is the international and domestic social human rights legislation and the important implementation criteria. Through reviewing the existing old people rights legislation, found that the UN framework of elderly rights exist "normative gaps" and "enforcement gaps". The policy document on aging and the elderly issues strategy provides a comprehensive processing scheme, but as a "soft law", the policy document does not have legally binding, can’t sanctions the behavior of fails to perform. Therefore, "hard law" must be developed to protect the old persons’rights from the political, economic, cultural, social and civil aspects. As one of the core of United Nations human rights conventions, the "hard law" must define the national responsibility, clear the implementation of the international level and domestic level mechanism.This paper is divided into five parts:The first part narrates the background of global aging and the challenge old people are facing, demonstrating the legitimacy of the human rights perspective under the rights protection, surveying the deficiency of the elderly rights within the UN system, points out necessity and feasibility of the rational construction of " the convention on the rights of the elderly" and significance of the development of it. Also introduces the the process of the convention.The second part is how to build "the basic principles of the convention on the rights of the elderly ". This section puts forward the function of the basic principles and features should have on the basis of the uniqueness as rights holders of the elderly and the particularity of rights violations. Through comparative study on the UN framework of interested parties in the resolution and Suggestions concerning the basic principles, finally puts forward the basic principles of the convention should include the principle of equality and non-discrimination, dignity, autonomy, and care.The third part focuses on building the rights content of the convention. Tracing the concern for the rights of the elderly in the United Nations human rights institutions, this section puts forward that in order to contracture a comprehensive rights framework, the rights system should pay attention the combination of integrity and comprehensiveness, the personality and human flourishing, the universality and particularity of human rights. These rights content is not difference between each other, mutually exclusive, but mutual tolerance and influence each other.The fourth part studies the contracture of implementation mechanism. This section follows the general principles of the UN convention on the international human rights implementation and mechanism, proposes the implementation of the convention from both the international level and domestic level. At the international level, proposes to build the human rights treaty bodies on the basis of absorptions of the UN reform efforts, establishing the elderly rights commission, at the same time, taking the mode of existing core human rights treaty bodies for reference, considering the cooperation with other human rights enforcement mechanism and make better to further the implementation of the promotion and protection of human rights. At the domestic level, the convention must specify what the the first step of states parties need to take is a comprehensive review the domestic legislation and policy framework from the aspects of legislative, administrative and judicial measures, to ensure that domestic protection keeping in line with the requirements of international conventions.The fifth part focuses on China’s problems about aging social. Investigating the present situation of aging in China, this part examines the current elderly rights guarantee system, puts forward that China should actively participate in the development of the convention on the rights of the elderly under UN framework, and meanwhile, need to strengthen the elderly rights’protection on the basis of the "rights" in the domestic legal guarantee system construction.