This page includes information on the human rights of people living with dementia, including mechanisms for attainment of these rights at the national and international levels.
ADI’s partner organisation Dementia Alliance International (DAI) and member associations of ADI around the world are crucial partners in this exercise. In recent years, our focus has been advocating for equal access to the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2015).
In 2016, members of ADI agreed to adopt a rights-based approach to dementia advocacy in support of the ongoing efforts by DAI to guarantee the rights of people living with dementia globally. We published ‘Access to the CRPD and SDGs by persons with dementia‘ setting out our position and highlighting those rights applicable to people living with dementia, that are included in the CRPD. We also published a briefing for Alzheimer associations on the topic. More recently, ADI held a webinar on ‘Dementia and rights: from principles to practice‘, focusing on gaps and solutions to putting dementia rights principles into practice.
Global examples
Member states must submit regular reports to the CRPD Committee on how all the rights and obligations reflected in the 33 core articles of the Convention are being implemented.
Civil society organizations such as ADI, national Alzheimer’s and dementia associations, as well as organizations of persons with disabilities such as DAI have an opportunity to feed into this process.
One example of this was the Canadian Civil Society Parallel Report Group which submitted a parallel report to the Committee, supported by 16 disability groups including Alzheimer Society of Canada, DAI and the Ontario Dementia Advisory Group.