The International Day of Older Persons is observed on October 1. It promotes the rights of older persons and involves them to participate in all spheres of life.

Due to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a set of rights is ensured to everyone. Nevertheless, rights are often violated. This also affects older persons, who increasingly face certain restrictions in asserting their rights, especially when it comes to employment, access to medical facilities, social assistance and protection, political life, authorities’ relations. The data are presented in the study on the attitude of the general population towards older persons, which was conducted in 2018 by The Council for Preventing and Eliminating Discrimination and Ensuring Equality with the support of the Council of Europe.

In jurisprudence of the Council for 2017-2019 there is a continuous increase in the number of cases of discrimination against older people, especially in the workplace. This phenomenon is related to the arbitrary disposal of the provision of Art. 86 p. (1) para. y1) of the Labour code, which allows employers, without explaining the reasons and without justifying their decision with arguments, to dismiss employees with the status of an old-age pensioner. While these changes have been established to manage the workforce, by increasing employment opportunities for young people who are unable to find work according to qualifications, the decisions of some employers have been arbitrary, based on stereotypes on efficiency – age of workers relationship. The Council, through the decisions on cases where discrimination against older persons was identified (cases 64/19, 58/18, 33/18, etc.) and the advisory opinion from August 6, 2019 provided a number of recommendations to amend the labour legislation to prevent this form of discrimination.

According to statistics, at the beginning of 2019, 558.4 thousand people aged 60+ lived in the country, which is 20.8% of the total resident population.

According to the National social insurance Fund, on January 1, 2019, the number of pensioners indicated 703.9 thousand people, and about 75% of them are old-age pensioners (526.7 thousand).

Due to the International Day of Older Persons, the Council team together with HelpAge will hold several information sessions for older persons in 5 rural settlements in the coming days.