A/HRC/44/36 explained that discriminatory laws could mean that women did not own land or their home and were likely to have very restricted or no access to financial credit and property. 34. The High Commissioner concluded that protecting the rights of older women involved protecting the rights of all women and girls and eliminating discrimination against women and girls in education, at work, in the family and in the public sphere. She mentioned the need to improve access to gainful work and lifelong learning, and the importance of fighting for equality in marriage, family, property rights, legal capacity and gender roles. Furthermore, discrimination related to pay equity, pregnancy or childcare and gender-based violence and harassment should be eradicated. Women’s and girls’ enjoyment of sexual and reproductive health and rights must be promoted and protected, and social protection systems should be adopted. She also insisted on the importance of public support for care services, which protected the rights of those needing care and those providing care, and of combating ageism and prejudice against older women and men. B. Overview of presentations 35. Ms. Ferro, said the panel discussion was critical and timely. She stated that population ageing should be celebrated, all the while also acknowledging and eradicating the accumulated discrimination faced by older women. She pointed out that there was a high risk that older women would end up in poverty owing to lifelong discrimination and oppressive patriarchal structures. She emphasized that the contribution of older women was indispensable to societies, yet was often overlooked and remained invisible. Worse, older women were often seen as an economic burden. 36. Ms. Nambeya began by stressing that African grandmothers were at the heart of the response to the AIDS pandemic: they had stepped in to care for more than 15 million children orphaned by AIDS. She mentioned that the “Grandmothers to Grandmothers” campaign was a dynamic global movement of solidarity to raise awareness and funds in support of African grandmothers. Grandmothers experienced a depletion of their resources in an economic, emotional and physical way because of the challenges they faced in supporting orphans and vulnerable children. She explained that to counter these challenges, innovative savings and income-generating activities were being developed, building a movement to ensure that government policies, programmes and strategies integrated the needs and rights of the grandmothers, including income security, pensions and grants, land and inheritance rights, eliminating violence against women and improving access to health care. The grandmothers were seeking protection of their rights and were leading a movement for justice. 37. Mr. Byrnes stated that while progress had been made by the United Nations human rights mechanisms, apart from the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women the attention paid to the rights of older women had been limited. He underscored the importance of an age perspective, as widespread ageism and a denial of the rights of older people continued to exist. To address this effectively, he proposed adding an independent, comprehensive and coherent age-based rights framework to the existing human rights system, such as a specifically formulated treaty on the rights of older persons. Such a treaty would incorporate detailed binding obligations such as, for example, a right to palliative care services, the right to further education or (re)training, the right to be free from abuse and the right to exercise legal capacity. It could also permit a coherent and holistic approach to the realization of existing rights, such as to fair, non-discriminatory and integrated social security and protection, requiring Governments to take into consideration the monetary and non-monetary contributions of older women to pensions and other social security systems. He pointed out that a new treaty would have a transformative potential, as the other group-focused treaties had had and would allow for a more coherent and holistic approach to ageism, which lay at the core of discrimination against older people. 38. Ms. Bethel emphasized that the economic empowerment and quality of life of older women was dependent on the earlier phases and stages of their life cycle. She noted that economic and social rights had a particular significance for older women and highlighted the importance of general recommendation No. 27 (2010) of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women on older women and the protection of their human rights. In general recommendation No. 27, the Committee had acknowledged the significance of taking a life-cycle approach to the full development and advancement of 8