A/HRC/45/14 16. On 21 May 2020, the Independent Expert participated as a panellist in a webinar on palliative care and COVID-19. She stressed the need for urgent and sustainable responses to improve palliative care for older persons and emphasized the obligation of States to prevent pain and suffering – that could amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. She was also a panellist in a webinar entitled “Protecting the rights of older persons during the COVID-19 pandemic”, organized by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and held on 27 May 2020, where she outlined the priority issues that she intended to address during the COVID-19 pandemic and stressed the necessity of moving the rights of older persons to the centre of the political and policy arenas. 17. Considering the regional dimension, on 5 June 2020 the Independent Expert took part as a panellist in a web talk convened by the Stakeholder Group on Ageing, an African regional coalition of civil society organizations, on the impact of COVID-19 on the human rights of older persons. Her intervention focused on the importance of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Older Persons in Africa as a normative framework that provides guidance to help address the key challenges of this health pandemic. 18. In her statement to the press on World Elder Abuse Awareness Day on 15 June 2020, the Independent Expert urged Governments and the international community to exercise global solidarity and step up action to effectively prevent, and protect older persons from, physical and psychological abuse, including neglect. She referred to distressing verbal and derogatory online abuse in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak, noting that derogatory comments in the media constituted a direct attack against the dignity of older persons. She urged States to implement and monitor measures to avoid ageist approaches and stressed that older persons needed to have access to accountability mechanisms that provided for remedies and redress when their human rights were violated. III. Representative and meaningful data on older persons6 A. Why data matters 19. To date, there is a serious gap in the data available to capture the lived realities of older persons and the enjoyment of their human rights. This lack of significant data and information on older persons is, in itself, an alarming sign of exclusion and renders meaningful policymaking and normative action practically impossible. Overcoming these impediments to the realization of the rights of older persons requires a fundamental conceptual shift in method and process that takes into account the entanglement of digital and analogue realities, or the so-called digitality.7 20. Comprehensive, meaningful and reliable data plays a key role in enhancing the understanding of global ageing and the impact of age-structural change. It fosters essential knowledge about the needs of older persons and creates the conditions for assessing the effectiveness of existing measures. It also provides the evidence base required to identify concrete gaps, to improve the formulation of targeted measures, to monitor their implementation and to report on progress. Data is necessary to reflect how the accessibility of the built environment, income adequacy or social protection enable or restrict older persons’ autonomy. The inclusion of older persons in public data, disaggregated by age, sex 6 7 6 “Data” is used as a generic term, which includes but is not limited to statistics. It is seen as encompassing a wide range of quantitative or qualitative standardized information compiled by national statistical offices as well as other governmental or non-governmental entities, whether at the local, national, regional or global level. “Digitality” refers to the entanglement of digital and analogue realities, whereby analogue not only encompasses anything that is offline, but is also used as a synonym for “obsolete”, which is understood as being replaced by the digital as the new. In the context of the report, it therefore also refers to the need for a new conceptual framework underpinning older persons’ data. See Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, second edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).