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Ecuador Adheres to the Inter-American Convention on Protecting the Human Rights of Older Persons

  March 21, 2019

Ecuador Adheres to the Inter-American Convention on Protecting the Human Rights of Older Persons
Photo:OAS

The Government of Ecuador today became the seventh country to adhere to the Inter-American Convention on Protecting the Human Rights of Older Persons. Adopted in June 2015, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and El Salvador have previously ratified.

The Permanent Representative of Ecuador to the Organization of American States (OAS), Carlos Alberto Játiva, today deposited the instrument of adhesion. At the ceremony, Ambassador Játiva recalled that in Ecuador "about 1.2 million people are senior citizens, of which 20% are poor and 6.34% live in extreme poverty" and stressed that the country has developed laws and regulations in favor of this group "that had traditionally been excluded."

"The Convention incorporates standards of promotion and protection of human rights complementary to those developed by the Constitution of the Republic and promotes the development of regulations that will make it easier to confront the situation of vulnerability of senior citizens," he added.

Secretary General Luis Almagro congratulated Ecuador and recalled, for his part, that the OAS "has been a pioneer in adopting a binding and modern instrument that recognizes the human rights of a particular segment of the population, the people over 60 years of age of our hemisphere, an instrument that lays the foundation so that those who reach old age, do so with dignity."

Reference: FNE-96139