Rosemary Lane wants all nations to think strategically about how to protect and nurture their older citizens.

As the person who is the “focal point” for ageing issues within the United Nations, it’s her job to place ageing on development agendas and make it part of the conversation in civil society. She shows member states how to take the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing, adopted in 2002, and make it their own.

The Madrid plan serves as “a framework,” she explains, “that addresses everything you can imagine under the sun.”

Ageing will be one of the topics under discussion when the 48th Session of the Commission on Social Development meets Feb. 3-12, and Lane was involved in compiling the report being presented by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, under which the United Nations Programme on Ageing is housed.

The Bristol, England native was not contemplating a career at the United Nations when she graduated from Bristol University in 1984. “When I left college, I really wanted to work in the media,” she remembers. 

But a move to New York resulted in a three-month contract at the United Nations in the now-defunct Department of Technical Cooperation, where she worked on water resources. Lane stayed on, later receiving a promotion in 1991 to work for the U.N.’s office of drug control in Vienna.

At that time, Vienna also housed the social office, which included ageing and youth issues. When the U.N. General Assembly decided to bring that office back to New York, Lane swapped posts and returned to the United States to concentrate on ageing issues.

“When I started working on ageing…it was very, very low on the agenda,” recalls Lane, who also has a master’s degree in social policy from Empire State College, State University of New York. “There wasn’t a lot really happening until they announced the international year in 1999. Once they made that decision, suddenly things started taking off.

“We still have to admit it’s not a huge agenda item” Lane continues, but adds, “there’s certainly been a lot of progress, both with action at the national level and also at the intergovernmental level as well.”

In the past few years, she has worked both on ageing and disability issues in the technical cooperation unit, but when the person who served as the focal point on ageing retired Lane took that position.

As she has traveled from country to country during her U.N. career, Lane has found that some concerns about ageing are universal, whatever the culture.

“Everybody’s dealing with the issue of health care, income support,” she says. “They’re struggling with changes, for whatever reason, in the family care of older persons.”

In Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, for example, younger people have migrated to Russia or neighboring countries for better work opportunities, leaving a gap in care of the elderly there.

But there also can be many differences in the cultural ways that older persons are viewed or whether they have access to needed services – across continents or even within regions, such as West Africa.

When Lane worked in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, she had to banish the notion that geographic proximity meant the two countries were exactly alike. Although similarities exist, Tajikistan has a Persian-based language and culture that sets it apart from its neighbor. “They themselves didn’t see that they could be compared to Kyrgyzstan because it was a different culture,” she explains.

One of Lane’s duties has been to help developing countries create national plans of action on aging. And that’s why the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing is important.

The Madrid plan is the successor to the 1982 Vienna plan, which was the first international instrument on ageing.With its heavy European influence, the Vienna plan “had more, to me, of a welfarist kind of approach,” she says. “Madrid came about, really, because we needed to address the issue of aging in developing countries as well as developed countries.”

The Madrid document, Lane adds, “was written to be of use to every single country, no matter what level of development.” 

To compile its report on ageing to the Commission on Social Development, her office solicited the views of all the U.N. member states, asking whether a human rights focus “would help to advance the implementation of the Madrid Plan of Action” and if so, how that should be done.

A legal instrument, working group within the commission, or Special Rapporteur on the rights of older persons are all possible options for addressing the human rights concerns of older persons. Fifty-five replies -- “actually quite a high number,” in Lane’s opinion – were received.

Some member states are in favor of a convention, while a few others believe it isn’t necessary because already they have their own legislation in place. “For us, the overwhelming message is this is something the member states need to discuss,” she says.

“Maybe from this commission, we’ll get more of a sense of what the thinking is, but that’s not guaranteed either.”