Commissioner’s Blog: Human Rights Day 2024

Since I took up post as Commissioner just a couple of months ago, I’ve travelled across Wales meeting and speaking with older people to hear directly about their experiences of growing older and the issues and challenges they face.

And often, what older people talk to me about is related to their rights – it’s just that older people don’t often use that kind of language.

For example, older people often tell me about difficulties accessing services and support, and the impact this has on their health and well-being, or how they are excluded due to more and more information and services moving online.

Older people don’t necessarily see these kinds of issues as being relating to our rights – such as our rights to health, family life or accessing information and services.

Helping older people to think about their rights in this way is crucial to making rights feel more real and relevant in people’s day-to-day lives, and to help ensure people feel empowered to use their rights as a basis to challenge poor practice.

Public bodies have a critical role to play here, too. While there has been a great deal of progress in terms of recognising the importance of rights in a broad sense, there must now be a move towards understanding what this means in practical terms.

So we need to see rights being used to guide policy and decision-making, as well as being embedded in the development, delivery and improvement of public services.

Rights based-approaches support public bodies to fulfil the statutory duties they have under a range of legislation, including UK-wide legislation such as the Human Rights Act (1998) and Equality Act (2010) and Wales-specific legislation, such as the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014.

But much more importantly, using rights in a practical way will help to ensure that services and support are more focused on people’s individual needs, reflecting the aims and ambitions that underpin rights legislation.

When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was accepted by the United Nations in 1948, Committee Chair Eleanor Roosevelt said that human rights begin in the ‘small places close to home’ – in our homes, communities, and workplaces, for example. She argued that unless rights are meaningful in these places, they are at risk of having little meaning anywhere.

This is a sentiment that I’m sure many older people would agree with, particularly those who have experienced issues with their rights being upheld.

That’s why ‘making rights real’ across our public services is crucial, and will remain a key focus of my work as Commissioner, today and every day.