1st October was the International Day of Older People. The United Nations General Assembly recognised the day in 1990 and people started observing it in 1991. Every year the day is celebrated with a new theme. This year’s theme is ‘Ageing with Dignity: The Importance of Strengthening Care and Support Systems for Older Persons Worldwide’ There are five stages in a person’s life: infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. It is true that the activities, relationships to family, attitudes towards life, physical fitness and biological capacities of a person are all confined by age levels. Aging is the last stage of life before the death. The World Health Organization selected the age of 60 and above as the elderly.

A person achieves human rights by birth. These rights are not restricted under any border. These are open to all people all over the world irrespective their ethnic, political, national or any other identities. These are essential for a human being to flourish in life. But in practice, all men cannot enjoy these rights properly.  And there are some reasons behind this.

A United Nations report shows some universal challenges on human rights which were presented by Kofi Annan, a former Secretary-General of the United Nations. It identifies poverty and global inequities, discrimination, armed conflict and violence, impunity, democracy deficits and weak institutions as obstacles in the way of ensuring human rights.

Bangladesh is a developing country which has an admirable culture and customs. However, in recent times, they are getting influenced by modern western culture. Today, parents are getting busier in earning money and failing to spend enough time with their children. In many families, domestic servants socialise the children while their parents only act as the providers of financial support for them. As a result, a lack of mutual understanding and liability is growing up between the parents and children.

Rights of Elderly People and Responsibilities of the Youth

However, the degradation of values and morality is one of the reasons behind the violation of human rights of older persons. In the sociological context, values refer to the qualities of accepting and refusing anything based on the consideration about good or bad. On the other hand, morality is a good quality of human being by which one accepts or denies what comes on the way. It refers to the quality to differentiate between what is proper and what is improper about the intentions, decisions and activities. Basically, morality and values are similar in their objectives.

Today, a large number of children do not take care of their parents properly. The children are more devoted to their careers and love money a lot. They tend to live separately from their parents. There are some duties and responsibilities of every man towards their parents according to different religions. But this is none of their concern; they adopt selfishness.

So, this indicates the extreme degradation of values and morality. How can a person care about others who are not caring about his own parents? Devoid of emotion, love, conscience and morality, man is being converted to machine in this way. This is a great challenge for the human rights of the older people. They become dependent on others in their old age. But who cares for them when their own children neglect them!

Now-a-days, the nuclear family has become a trend. That is why old parents often cannot find their place in their children’s families. Again, often the old parents are not interested in leaving their rural setting. As a result, they live alone and face hardships. 

Besides, in the present time a large number of children hanker after leading a luxurious life abroad. But there are examples of children living abroad while their parents live in their native country. Parents sometimes have enough properties but no child to live with them and take care of them.

The elderly people are part of the total population. They provide all kinds of support to their heirs. But at the last stage of their lives, some of them face a lot of suffering in both developed and underdeveloped society. Many parents are even subjected to forced labour and forced baby care while they have low-graded foods, unhealthy shelter, lack of clothes and necessary medical treatment, according to several reports and articles. In many cases, they give away all properties to their heirs (often due to pressure) and then take shelter in old homes.

We have to bear in mind that everybody has to face this stage of life. So, we cannot deny the role of our older people at all. They have brought us into this world and made their highest efforts to give us a better life. We should consider them as our resource, not as our burdens, and we have to give them their due respect. They deserve all the human rights. And they deserve some special facilities and rights on all the grounds.

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The writer is a Lecturer, Department of Political Science, Barishal Cadet College.

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