2014-07-29-Overview of UN Disability Conventions
Seminars@Hadley
An Insider’s Overview of the
United Nations Convention on the
Rights of Persons with Disabilities
Presented by
Dr. Christie Gilson
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
July 29, 2014
Host
You’re listening to Seminars @ Hadley. This seminar is “An Insider’s Overview of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities,” presented by Dr. Christie Gilson; moderated by Larry Muffett.
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars @ Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett, I am a member of Hadley’s Seminars Team and I also work in Curricular Affairs. Today’s seminar topic is “An Insider’s Overview of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.”
Our Presenter today is Dr. Christie Gilson. Dr. Gilson is a veteran of both higher education and the disabilities rights movement. Her work in these areas contributed to her being named a US Delegate to the UN Conference. Today, Dr. Gilson will be sharing some insights with you on what the Conference was all about and what took place.
Now without any further ado let me welcome Dr. Gilson so we can begin our seminar. Good morning!
Dr. Christie Gilson
Good morning, everyone! I’m so pleased to be with you this morning, afternoon or evening depending on where in the world you are. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to come and learn with us. We appreciate that very much.
You know, the Hadley School for the Blind is such a tremendous organization and it is a pleasure for me to have the opportunity to participate in one of these seminars again. I have been a Hadley student since like 1987 and I remember when I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to come to Hadley from time to time to speak or to meet staff and so on, how very friendly and welcoming the culture and the people are there. It’s a tremendous place.
And then I just have to say one more thing from an education perspective about how wonderful Hadley is. You know, those of us who can’t see or who are losing our sight, there’s always this barrier whenever we try to do most things or interact with organizations – “Well, I can’t read your forms,” or “I can’t read the textbook” or whatever. And to be able to learn in a way that allows me full access to the content and to my instructor without any barriers is such a relief and it is a model to other educational institutions.
Just one more thing about myself, I guess that’s probably relevant here – I’ve been blind since birth. I’m a Braille reader, and so those perspectives of disability pride and that kind of thing are part of what informed my work and will certainly inform this presentation today.
So the Convention which I will refer to interchangeably as the Convention or the Treaty is a document that can be signed by various, well really any country that is a party to the United Nations. And I have looked at many different websites as I have prepared for today’s seminar and there are a couple that are really, really helpful.
One of them is www.disabilitytreaty.org, and I’m going to send these to Larry so that he’ll be able to put them up, so anyone looking to get these resources can do so. But again, this website is www.disabilitytreaty.org. And this is a website that is created by, sponsored by the United States International Council on Disabilities, an organization that has been really central in the US’ advocacy efforts regarding the Convention.
So a little bit of history about the Convention and then I’ll explain more specifically what it is. The US signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on July 30th of 2009 and we have, our government has reviewed this Convention on various levels of federal government to ensure that it is appropriate with the laws we already have on the books and found it to be so. This Convention was brought to the US Senate in December of 2012 and as you may know for treaties, the Senate must have a supermajority of support – so 67 Senators must vote affirmatively. We came five votes short of that goal in December of ’12 although we thought we had enough Senators onboard.
The Treaty has come out of committee again and hopefully will be brought to the Senate floor for a vote again soon. We will decide whether we want to be ratified as a member state. So there are two steps to this: one as I said, we already signed the Treaty; and secondly, ratification of the Treaty. My understanding, and I’m no UN expert – I’m harkening back to my political science; I think I had what, three courses in undergrad in the mid-‘90s. So the ratification would mean that we as the US would say that we want to be guided by the principles outlined in the treaty as a country.
So what is the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities? I thought I would explain this briefly, then I’ll pause for some questions and then what I’d like to do is give you some color, that is some of the fun, the details on what it’s like to actually be at the UN and not just do the typical tour but to sit in as a delegate. It is incredible.
Alright, so quickly, the UN estimates that there are 650 million people with disabilities throughout the world, and this comes from www.un.org/disabilities/convention. Others say there’s 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide. The Convention marks a shift in how we think about disability. Typically in especially the 20th Century the US and other countries thought of disability in a medical way – so that is, we with disabilities were seen as less than, as needing to be cured, and it was the job of physicians and other clinicians to help us become as non-disabled as possible.
So the disabilities as a “problem,” I’m putting that in quotes, was located in the individual. And this treaty and many disability laws that are on the books in various countries now understand disability to be a, well, there’s lots of different perspectives but in this Treaty I believe it’s referred to as the human rights perspective, so that just like any other person in the world people with disabilities have rights to all kinds of different things. Think of the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence and so on, and those kinds of rights.
Wikipedia has a really good explanation of what the Convention is about. You can read about the purpose of the Convention but suffice it to say it’s about protecting and upholding the rights of people with disabilities, just like people without disabilities. There are many rights that we have as global citizens that have been outlined in other Conventions or Treaties, but there are a couple that are specific to people with disabilities in the Convention.
One of those is the right to access. We have the right to access our communities fully, to be in them, to participate. We have the right to live independently and be included in all aspects of living and working. We have the right to accessible information technology – so for example, we are using this Talking Communities software because many of the more popular chat or group meeting software packages are not so accessible to blind people.
We have the right to move around in terms of mobility in our communities. We have the right to habilitation and rehabilitation. Now, I’m no certified rehabilitation counselor but my understanding is that habilitation is helping people with disabilities to be as functional in their employment settings, in their lives, in their relationships, in all aspects of life as they can; and rehabilitation would mean someone acquires a disability, previously they were able to function on an appropriate level for their lives and rehabilitation’s goal is to help them achieve as much functionality post-disability as possible. So we have the right to habilitation and rehabilitation.
We have the right to participate in political and public life. So think of voting. Those of us who are eligible to vote in the US who have visual impairments recently have been afforded the right to vote independently because of accessible machinery that is available now. But many of us can recall the days when that was not the case. We have the right to a cultural life that is full and accessible, and we have the right to recreation and sports as people with disabilities.
And those who ratify, the states – and when I say state here obviously I mean countries – the countries that ratify the Convention should promote awareness about disability and should do things like ensure access to our roads, our buildings, again our information technology.
So I just want to state something that’s fairly obvious here. Obviously the US and every other country I’ve been in do not have roads that are fully accessible to blind people, do not have buildings that are fully accessible to us, do not have information technology that’s always accessible to us. This Treaty sets out principles to which the countries that ratify would like to adhere. It doesn’t mean that all of a sudden when we sign it boom – we’re going to all have these accessibility measures in place.
I think at this point I’m going to pause and check what time it is and see if anyone has questions before I go into the ways that countries can register their concerns about particular parts of the Treaty, and some of the varying opinions that people in the US have regarding whether we should ratify the treaty or not. So I’ll pause and see if there are any questions.
Larry Muffett
If people have questions please take the opportunity to ask Christie some questions.
Caller
How can a person go about finding what Senators did not join that number that you suggested because I’m a little concerned about our Senator down here in this great state.
Dr. Christie Gilson
To the gentleman who is asking about where we find who supported it and who did not, my understanding is that every democratic Senator is fully behind the Treaty, that some republican senators are behind the Treaty and some are not. I know that I have a republican and a democratic senator and I know that my Senator Toomey used to be opposed to the treaty; I don’t know now what his feelings are. But I assure you that I have let him know my opinion.
So what you can do is you can call your Senator’s office, that would probably be the best thing, and state whatever your opinion is – whether you’re opposed or you’re for the treaty. Feel free to register, ask your questions.
Caller
Thank you, I’ll do that.
Larry Muffett
Christie, when you get a chance, perhaps you were already planning to talk about this but could you talk a little bit about how exactly you got appointed to be a Delegate to the Conference?
We also have another question: Miley would like to know why would the people who voted against it do that? What were their gripes, concerns about the way the Treaty was written?
Dr. Christie Gilson
Wonderful questions. So I’ll go over the controversies or the varying perspectives on the Treaty first and then I will be happy to talk about the process of being a part of the US Delegation.
Okay, the websites that I went to to find out the opinions of those who are opposed to the treaty are generally, the ones I’ve found were older – they were from 2012 when the US Senate did not approve the Treaty. I haven’t found, and I didn’t do like a comprehensive review and spent days on this, but I haven’t found recent sites that seem to indicate opposition to the Treaty. But back in ’12 what I saw was two main concerns.
Those are one related to abortion. The Treaty says that people with disabilities along with all others have, well, I don’t know if it says specifically “those without” but it says “sexual and reproductive rights of people, world citizens, have been enshrined in other Treaties.” With this Treaty obviously we’re talking about people with disabilities, so abortion is not specifically mentioned in the Treaty but the statement that the “sexual and reproductive rights of people with disabilities should be upheld” has some concerned that that would suggest that either people’s rights to abortion would be expanded or something of that nature.
The other concern that I have, oh, you know what – let me go back and talk a little bit about abortion and how that has been dealt with by other countries. So there have been many Catholic countries who have signed on to the Treaty, who have ratified the Treaty, and any party that ratifies is allowed to register a reservation. This is a concern that they have with a particular part of the Treaty. So several of the countries who have large Catholic populations have registered reservations regarding abortion. And so they’re able to ratify the Treaty but suggest that they wouldn’t necessarily adhere to certain parts, even though the word “abortion” is not mentioned in the Treaty. Those countries have chosen to register that reservation.
Other reservations by other countries, for example the United Kingdom has some reservations regarding education in the Treaty. And just to, I try to always cover the developing world as well as the developed world, so Mauritius has registered a reservation related to emergencies and natural disasters. So if we think back to Hurricane Katrina for example, and we know that the Red Cross sometimes said people who had service animals could not bring their service animals to emergency shelters, that’s the kind of thing that my understanding is Mauritius would have a reservation about. I’m guessing that would be related to if it’s a life and death situation we don’t have the means to protect people with disabilities at the level the Treaty would suggest.
Okay, so those are some of the reservations. Now, I want to point out a couple of the senators who are republicans who are in support of the Treaty, because I think they have ably articulated that they tend to be conservative people but that they feel that the Treaty should nonetheless be ratified. And since Hadley is based in Illinois I’d like to first say that Senator Kirk is a staunch supporter of the Treaty. Yes, he’s a republican. He has been a friend of Hadley’s for a very long time, a wonderful person, and if you would recall a couple of years ago he sustained a stroke and then after rehabilitation he came to I think it was the US Capitol and walked up the steps even though he had somewhat impaired mobility.