Rethinking the Right to Care and Not to Care: Navigating the Care Crisis, Solidarity, and State Responsibility in an Ageing Europe

Population ageing is transforming senior care across Europe, with a shift towards “ageing in place” and reduced state involvement. This increases the burden on informal caregivers, particularly women, who often receive little support or recognition. Alongside, the rise of private care markets, including unregulated 24-hour live-in services, creates both opportunities for relief and heightened risks for caregivers. The "care crisis," characterized by a societal neglect of care responsibilities, paradoxically emerges within a framework shaped by human rights.

Nancy Fraser connects this crisis to “time poverty,” “work-family balance” challenges, and “social exhaustion”, highlighting pressures impacting social caregiving capacity. While care is essential for sustaining culture, economy, and politics, in contemporary capitalist societies, these foundations are eroded, leading to a deepening care crisis (Fraser, 2016).

Meanwhile, care recipients and caregivers challenge their precarious situations and bring cases to courts, invoking their rights. Considering the need to recognise a right to care that includes the right to receive care, to care, and to participate in care-related decision-making (Tronto, 2013), we analyse the complexity of the right to care, including its positive and negative facets.

With care is closely linked to the concept of solidarity. As Dowling describes, care is an "ethical social relationship" that fosters compassionate bonds (Dowling, 2021). Different forms of solidarity shape our understanding of care responsibilities, emphasising shared responsibility and state support (Scholz, 2008). When the state neglects care needs, it leads to precarity, a state where particular lives are devalued (Butler, 2009). Jurisprudence can either operate as a mechanism of transformation of precarity or reify it. In our paper, we will analyse both these positions and show that the right to care also contains a right not to care, relying on ethnographic and human rights research, combining perspectives of two disciplines, social anthropology and human rights.