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Transcript - American University CRPD stategy session
By JoeVanderVeer | April 2, 2008
Disability Rights Convention Strategy Session
March 31, 2008
CART Reporter: Natalie C. Ennis, CSR CA, RPR / CI and CT
HADAR HARRIS: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Hadar Harris, and I am the Executive Director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law here at American University, Washington College of Law. My brief remarks are going to be even briefer at the moment. We are pleased to welcome all of you here today, and on behalf of the dean, who is in Argentina and unable to attend today, I want to welcome you all here and thank you for coming. Today is a follow up to a conference we held last year, almost exactly a year ago, two weeks after the Convention opened for signature. It is incredibly important for us as a community of activists, human rights activists, activists for the rights of the disabled, development activists, to come together and to look at the new treaty, the ways that it will impact around the world, and how it can be useful for us in the United States.
Today’s meeting is meant to give us an opportunity to talk about how we as a community of activists can come together and work in coalition to strategize around pushing for U.S. ratification of this important treaty.
I want to just say a few thanks and a few logistical notes. First, logistics, because before you say thank you to anybody, people really want to know where the bathrooms are. So a few logistical notes. There are restrooms, if you haven’t already found them, outside of this room. Accessible restrooms on the other side of the elevator bank. There are conference hosts who have badges that denote who they are. They are circulating both inside and outside the room to assist anybody who needs help for whatever reason, if it is to get a drink, if it is help finding the restroom, if it is with documents or anything like that. Please find a conference host.
Also, we will be circulating the list of people who have registered for today’s conference. If you would like to be on that list, please make sure that you are officially registered for the conference and the people in our special events office who are sitting outside at the sign in table will take care of making sure that you are registered. If you do not wish your information to be circulated, please also let them know so that we can take you off of the list that will be emailed to all the participants following today’s event.
A few words of thanks, now that you know where the bathrooms are. To Eric Rosenthal, for all of his commitment in helping to set up last year’s conference and this year’s conference. It’s important to bring us all together, and Eric has been tireless in working the phones and coordinating today’s event.
(Applause.)
In advance to Bobby Silverstein and to Jeff Rosen for their excellent facilitation skills through the strategy session this afternoon.
And maybe most importantly, to Amir Tejani, our special events person who has helped put together all of the logistics for today. Thank you, Amir.
(Applause.)
For the official opening words, I want to hand the podium over to Eric Rosenthal, who will speak for a few minutes and then introduce our panelists. So thank you again for coming, and we anticipate a really valuable and fruitful afternoon. Thank you.
ERIC ROSENTHAL: Well, thank you, very, very much, Hadar. It is a real pleasure to be here today, to see the group of faces from people who traveled from all over the country to be here. When we thought of today’s event, we thought we would get 20 people together to talk about building a plan. Without almost any effort, this large group of people came together. That is truly exciting and I think really underscores the sense of history, I think, that we have in the making. So many of the people in this room were key in helping to create the disability rights movement here in the United States. We have some of the real key leaders and innovators who help put disability into a civil rights framework in the United States. That civil rights framework inspired countries around the world, and really then inspired the United Nations to bring that into international human rights law. And now we have a Convention, and people may or may not know it, but the world really owes thanks to many of the individuals who worked to found the disability rights movement here in the United States and get the Americans with Disabilities Act passed. A sense of history because not only did we, in this room, help inspire it, but many of the people who gained the political support for it are again here today, and we can draw on their tremendous experience. The same coalition that came together once is now coming together again. I think that this excitement and this coalition has potential that goes well beyond just getting the disability rights treaty passed. I’ll attribute this thought to Marca Bristo, who said, we’re working right now on the ADA Restoration. Maybe the excitement of the disability treaty can help us strengthen our own domestic laws as well. But our U.S. Constitution says international treaties are the law of the land. So we will think practically how that works, how it works in the United States, we’ll have a brief informational component, and then essentially, this discussion is an open discussion, a facilitated discussion, with a very clear purpose. It’s really to create a coalition. We have tried very hard to make sure that all the key players are here in the room today: The advocacy organizations, the individuals who have been the leadership in working to gain support for this. We want to share our information, share our experiences, make sure we’re all on the same page, and not leave this room until we really commit to all working together. There’s a lesson from the ADA. All different disability groups working together. The different coalitions that we had formed. We’ll hear about the nuts and bolts of how those coalitions work. We can learn from their experience. So really it’s about process. It’s about establishment process to move forward so that we can be sure that this concept of a Convention moves into reality. We’ve got a presidential election; we need a plan for reaching out to the presidential candidates. And then following that, we’ve got to get two thirds of the U.S. Senate to support. It’s about counting volts. It’s about getting democrats. It’s about getting republicans. And bread and butter, inspiration, this is a great Convention but it won’t be part of our law unless we get two thirds of Senate majority to sign after the President signs. So it will be a hard struggle and it won’t happen without a plan and us all working together.
So I’m pleased we’ve been able to come here today. Before we proceed, I would also like to thank, number one, all the different cosponsoring organizations. They are listed on the programs, so I won’t repeat them, but many of them have contributed resources to making today possible, kind of bringing in their experience and leadership. We’ll hear from all the different cosponsoring organizations. Thank you for the support of all the different organizations.
I would like to particularly thank Yoshiko, who is helping to support our reception at the end of the day, but it’s a fabulous group of people, and the very fact that we were able to get all these groups together I think is a good sign for us, having a great coalition and support for this.
Last but not least, the Washington College of Law at American University. 15 years ago when I founded Mental Disability Rights International, I would not have been able to get started if they had not offered me free office space. Robert Dinerstein sitting here was one of my first advisors. This law school has always been open to this idea. It is perhaps one of the greatest human rights center of its kind in the United States, to be so open and supportive of including disability rights on its core agenda. We really owe an enormous thanks to American University. This is the second year in a row they’ve invited us back for our conference. Hadar Harris, thank you. Your doors have always been open and we really appreciate what you’ve done. Amir Tejani has been fabulous to work with. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
Our first panel will be very, very short as we are running short on time. I’ll turn it over to Professor Robert Dinerstein. Thank you.
ROBERT DINERSTEIN: Thank you, Eric. If you had seen the offices that we gave to Eric 15 years ago, you wouldn’t have been so impressed. But I was in a similar office, so I guess it wasn’t so bad.
I’m also a little bit leery for those of you not from the Washington College of Law, you should know that this is a room where we have faculty meetings. So the notion that anybody up here would say to anybody out there, you’re not leaving until we come to some agreement? Very scary.
(Laughter.)
But I am also of course pleased to be here today, involved with this wonderful group of people. We often say at conferences that there’s a lot more wisdom on the other side of the podium than this side. At least speaking for myself, that’s very true today. So I look forward to be involved today with this working conference which has such an important agenda before it.
Because we are tight for time, I want to introduce briefly the three other members of the panel. I’ll have some very brief comments after their comments. We will go in geographic order from the far right on the panel. Charlotte McCain Nhlapo is from The World Bank. She is a human rights lawyer from South Africa. She is appointed to the South African Human Rights Commission in 1999, and then reappointed in 2002. She works at The World Bank. In her position there, she works on East Asia and pacific region and Africa as a senior operations specialist. Over the years, she’s worked primarily in human rights and with a particular interest in marginalized groups. She’s written widely in the area.
To her left, is Abdelkerim Chtourou, who is a legal advisor for social affairs in Tunisia. He is one of our Humphrey fellows this year, which brings lawyers from around the world to study here. In his capacity, he represents a variety of institutions. He has participated in writing laws for protection of people with disabilities in Tunisia. Before our panel started, somebody was up telling him that his job is to get Tunisia to ratify the Convention within the next week? Is that what you were saying? So not much of an agenda there.
Next is Gehane El Sharkawy from Egypt. She is also a Humphrey fellow. When we were talking about what she’s been doing this year, she actually had enough time to come here today. She’s doing lots of interesting fellowships while she’s here this year. She is the disability coordinator of the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood in it Egypt, where she collaborated between governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders to draft legislation. She’s also supervising projects that target children with disabilities, their families and communities, and has also extensive experience and has one of her unusual characteristics for our Humphrey program is she’s actually not a lawyer but somehow managed to survive that limitation.
Without further ado, I will turn it over to Charlotte.
CHARLOTTE McCAIN: Thank you very much. Is this on? Does that work? Is that okay?
I would like to thank very much the organizers for the invitation to be here. It really feels like it’s a family in a lot of ways. I’ve been asked to present a short overview of the Convention in 10 minutes. For those of you that were part of negotiating this process, you know this is like a wild task. Let me get to the point.
On March 30th, 2007, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its optional protocol were opened for signature after being adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in December 2006. They are legally binding international instruments which clarify obligations to respect the human rights of all persons with disabilities. These ad hoc instruments marked a paradigm shift in attitudes and approaches to persons with disability from being objects of pity and charity to rights holders and bearers of rights. The Convention reframes the needs and concerns of people with disabilities, using a human rights lens. And now it counts as the nine core international human rights convention. The Convention is ground breaking in many respects. It’s the first human rights convention of the new century. It was negotiated with very strong input from people with disabilities. It was negotiated with cross disability. It also had the involvement of national human rights institutes. It was inclusive in its process. And to date, it was the most studious negotiated treaty.
More than 650 million people with disabilities worldwide will be affected by this treaty. It makes provisions for all human rights, as people with disabilities equal with all members of society. This has been particularly relevant for 80% of people living with disabilities in the developing world. It holds promise for the implementation of strategies by government and the U.N. and other international agencies. And thereby combats exclusion. In short, this Convention presents a framework that finally empowers the world’s largest minority to claim their rights and to participate in national affairs on an equal basis with the rest of society. The Convention is premised on a paradigm shift that sees disability as evolving, and that it is the result of interaction between the person and his or her environment. The Convention sets out specific actions to state parties and calls upon the international community to play a key role in its implementation.
Now, it’s important to note that the provisions of the Convention are guided by eight principles, and as such are enumerated in a stand alone article. Again, this is an uncommon feature for conventions. These principles in Article III, which I won’t go through, say the Convention is more than just a nondiscrimination convention, but rather, it is a convention that provides for physical rights as well as for social and economic rights. The Convention does not create new rights. Instead, it just builds on human standards rules and brings together a whole range of existing human rights.
Now, the actual text of the Convention starts one a nonbinding preamble which sets forth the rationale for the Convention. And essentially sets the stage and the context for the text that then follows. The preamble is then followed by an introductory article, and here is where we find definitions such as universal design and those kind of definitions. The Convention does not define disability or persons with disabilities.
We then have articles of general application which are Articles III to IX, and these address concepts related to implementation of the Convention. I think what’s important here is that Article IV makes reference to progressive realization vis à vis these rights. So it says that state parties need to show that they’re progressively making effort towards the implementation. An important article is Article VIII, which obligates state parties to engage in awareness raising. But as expected, the core set of articles relate to the specific rights, and these can be found in the cluster of articles between Articles X and XIII these are the range of human rights that have been contextualized from the experience of people living with disabilities.
The next cluster of articles relates to monitoring and implementation measures. These are found in Articles 31 to 40. This section distinguishes itself in a lot of ways from a lot of other U.N. Conventions. It has many firsts. One, it has a dedicated article on international cooperation, Article 32, and it’s important to note that this article is not just about financial aid, but it’s very much about sharing best practices, providing technical assistance, and learning from each other.
Another first is Article 40, which makes provisions. We then have what I see as the teeth of the Convention. These are Articles 33 to 39, which address two levels of monitoring, the national level of monitoring and the international level of monitoring. In terms of mechanisms to ensure implementation, nationally, national human rights institutions will have a critical role to play in the monitoring or other types of agencies. At the international level, the idea is that there will be a committee of experts, including people with disabilities.
Now, it’s important to note that this committee will be tasked with considering reports from state parties. I think it’s really important for us to watch this space, because this committee will be very important in terms of interpreting law, interpreting the provisions of the Convention, and assessing how states are progressively realizing the provisions contained in the convention.
Finally, in accordance with the optional protocol, this expert committee can also receive communications. I just need to note that while we have to date 17 countries that have ratified the Convention, we don’t have that number in terms of the optional protocol, and we need to make sure that we don’t lose it. The optional protocol is a very important part of this convention.
So I have 2 more minutes and I would just like to say, friends, in conclusion, that we know that the Convention is not a panacea for the social exclusion and discrimination faced by people with disabilities around the world, but we do know that it is a tool and a process, one that has already begun to create spaces, dialogue, and partnerships, and perhaps most importantly, hope for millions of people with disabilities across the world. We do, however, have a responsibility or responsibilities as individuals and as a collective to further develop this roadmap, to breathe life into the provisions of the Convention, to make it work for us, to use it to increase visibility of persons with disability, both within the U.N. human rights system and in society more generally. We must inside that our rights are respected, protected, and promoted. However, we also need to be realistic and recognize that this will not happen overnight. I just want to end by saying that there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done. For example, we need to make sure that we get more state parties to ratify the Convention. We need to look at supporting state parties to develop legislative and programmatic changes at the national level to implement the obligations under this convention. We need to encourage human rights monitoring bodies to pay more attention to disability issues. We need to establish comprehensive monitoring systems, and we need to establish systems for international corporation.
Having said all of that, I have to say that I am excited, because I have seen in a short space of time how this Convention has galvanized thinking. But we need to continue to work together to ensure swift signature and ratification of this Convention. We now have 17 ratifications. We need 20 in order for the Convention to come into cause. We have to aim for universal ratification of this Convention. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
ABDELKERIM CHTOUROU: Thank you. I will focus on Tunisia and the steps towards ratification and the challenges as a developing country. The last census, 2004, showed that only 150,000 people are disabled in Tunisia. This figure didn’t reflect exactly the disability community in Tunisia for two main reasons. The first one is that a lot of people are not aware of their disability. For example, all people just think that their disability is a result of getting older. Also, people think that they qualify for a disability provided they have an illustration. Without it, they can’t qualify as disabled.
Starting with the independence of Tunisia in the ’50s, the movement of the disability community has established the first steps. But these steps are usually led by the parents of children with disabilities. That’s why most of the organizations in Tunisia are composed of different organizations that are treated with different categories of disabilities. Although this limited movement in terms of number and in terms of resources, they succeeded in 1967 to adopt a law, but this law wasn’t from the beginning related only to people with disabilities with blindness and deficiency in vision. But this success affected parents of persons with disabilities. A lot of them have been struggling in order to establish organizations and to create some special centers in order to satisfy the needs of their children. It was only in 1981 that Tunisia adopted the general law about disabilities. But although this law was a good thing, it was just basic recognition. Without any appropriate tools for implementation, which jeopardizes its effectiveness.
In 2005, Tunisia succeeded to adopt a new law, fortunately. This law showed that disability was ground for discrimination. In other words, the legislature in Tunisia recognized the rights of people with disabilities in education and employment. Perhaps we’ll have a question now, then why the disability community isn’t interested in the Convention, why we have such law. I will answer to this question after I will speak about the steps that have been done toward ratification. In Tunisia, we signed the U.N. Convention and optional protocol in 2007.
In February, 2008, the parliament adopted the national ratification, but this national ratification doesn’t bind the state on the international level. We need to go further on the international level. I will go back to my question. The interest of the disability community, of people with disabilities, to this convention. It could be two main reasons. Our legal system, there is no appropriate way for people with disabilities to raise their allegation for discrimination. And also, a lot of people are not aware of their disabilities and the opportunities that they have in order to get access to their rights. But on the other side also, the state has shown interest in adopting and ratifying the Convention. And especially because our law of 2005 ranks the care of people with disabilities as a national responsibility. That’s why the state could never and perhaps would never be able to assume such a responsibility without the partnership of the citizens of society. And the best way to encourage this civil society, to show the commitment, at least the best way is to ratify this convention and also the protocol, the additional protocol, in order to somehow encourage all the civil society to go further and to get more involved. But this ratification has a lot of challenges. At least from a legal perspective. For example, the U.N. Convention requires that the state will modify its national legislation in order to comply with the Convention provisions, but this is a real challenge for Tunisia. For example, a case of nondiscrimination cases, it is more appropriate to give the burden of the proof, to put the burden of the proof on the other party, not on the people with disabilities.
This situation could be done in our system under legislative law. This would of course oblige the government and everybody to assume the burden of the proof. I mean, to show that this body hasn’t discriminated against people with disabilities. In civil cases, it is different. We have a rule in our country that the burden of the proof should be made by the plaintiff himself. This perhaps may cause a lot of problems, especially I do believe that the litigation perspective is very important and worth advocating here, because without proper tools to litigate the cases from the court in order to push especially the private sector to go further for nondiscrimination, the law should be adjusted. And perhaps the constitution would help, because we have a rule that we’ll have a rule that gave the ratified convention the higher position than that of the national law. I hope that we will do our best, especially from the civil society to go further and to succeed with this commitment. Thank you.
(Applause.)
GEHANE EL SHARKAWY: Hi. Good afternoon. Before I talk about the U.N. Convention in Egypt, I would like to give you
So I would like to start with a brief introduction about Egypt, to set the stage for the discussion about the U.N. Convention and put it in context. Of the 22 Arab states, Egypt is the of the 22 Arab states, Egypt is the most populous country. 10% persons with disabilities. We have at least 7 million persons with disabilities in Egypt. We have high risk factors. Also high poverty and the like. So the majority of the population is high percentage disabled. There are major issues around services and there are estimates that only a small percentage of persons with disabilities are actually receiving the services that they need.
You would be more disadvantaged if you were in the northern area. So we have a major inequity concern about services, including education services, medical services, and the like. In addition to this problem, services, they are largely inaccessible to the majority of people. Now, you can imagine how this affects people with disabilities and their social exclusion. I do not however want to give you a totally grim picture that everything is bad in Egypt, because that’s not really the case. In the past few years, persons with disabilities have been organizing with NGOs. Also, the NGOs are moving away from (inaudible) and promoting political and educational rights of persons with disabilities.
As a government employee, I also know that the government is moving more towards disability law. If I look now at the nation, Egypt signed the Convention last April. Last month, it was approved, the Convention, which was a good step towards ratification. Now, the question is, what implication would the Convention have once it’s ratified by Egypt? It would have a huge impact on national disability law. The closest legislation we have towards disability law is the social regulation law of 1995. Now that we have the U.N. Convention, it will be a very essential tool to make our national disability law more obligatory, asking people with disabilities what they need and what they want and what they aspire to. In addition, it will be more comprehensive than the current law covers regarding employment and education services and the like.
I also think that the U.N. Convention will make disability laws more enforceable. We have a 5% quota of employment for persons with disabilities. However, employers would prefer to pay a small fine than to actually employ persons with disabilities. So once we have the U.N. Convention, I think the laws are going to be more enforced.
Now, the second thing that is going to be affected by the U.N. Convention, I think it will be a good thing, is the mechanism that was discussed earlier. The Convention on the rights of the child, I participated in the CRC. Not only does it attempt to be honest about the situation, it is also key for any lags that we have so that in the next report, we can say this is what we have been doing in order to improve the situation. So in both cases, it will be able to help us on the right track and also improve the situation, as I discussed earlier in my presentation.
There are efforts from civil society towards the Convention. If we combine this with the reporting mechanism and have new disability laws coming, I think overall, the future will be brighter than the present. This is not to say that there will not be challenges. I particularly think that there will be huge challenges when it comes to disability, because there isn’t really a good law for disability in Egypt. This is one of the ways I think to focus on more.
Now, as you can imagine, the context of Egypt is very different from the context of the United States. This is what I want to focus on today. You have tremendous experience as disability activists and as participants in the U.N. Convention. You have a lot of advocacy experience that we may not have. So there is, I think, a large space for us to learn from each other, and this is what I would like to see today.
I think that there is much more wisdom on the other side of the podium, as Robert said, so I will now stop and ask you for your questions. Thank you.
(Applause.)
ROBERT DINERSTEIN: I’m going to have very brief comments today, partly so we have some chance to take questions from you and to get a little back on track.
Last year, when we had the workshop that was referred to earlier, one of the discussions was, well, what are the barriers to U.S. ratification. Of course, that’s part of our discussion for later today. Some arguments were in complete opposition to each other. One, we don’t need the U.N. Convention because we already have sufficient protection, the ADA. Second, opposite to that was, if we don’t sign the Convention, we’re not complying because of the constant obligations of people signing saying we don’t do all these things in the convention and therefore don’t comply with the law. You can’t have it both ways. The second stance, not to sign it unless you’re already doing all those things, would mean that instead of talking about 100 some odd countries signing and 17 ratifying, we’re talking about none, because I dare say no country has satisfied all the conditions that are in this convention.
There are parts of this Convention that go further than U.S. federal law do. There certainly are aspects of the Convention that deal with economic, social, and cultural rights which are not explicitly recognized by the federal government although we do in many states there. Are other propositions with which some don’t agree, such as the right to live in the community. We will certainly not complying with that to the extent that we need to. Those established goals that we would have in the United States, where the issue wouldn’t be so much about what the law says but what the implementation of the law is, which continues to be a very big problem.
If we were having this discussion in a domestic context, we would be remiss if we didn’t say that one of the big problems we have regarding the ADA Restoration Act is just definition of disability itself. As you heard from Charlotte, the Convention doesn’t define disability. That may well be an issue in the United States and other countries. It may be much more of a struggle with the problems we’ve had. But it does seem to me that it doesn’t take much to look at not just the ADA but the other array of federal statutes that protect the rights of people with disabilities that at the core, the relationship between the Convention and those statutes, is very strong. When Charlotte talks about the social model of disability as an integrationist model is important behind legislation in this country. So we’re not struggling with at the statutory level how to model definitions, but it does seem to be there’s a lot of agreement about what the right processes ought to be philosophically for people with disabilities.
And lastly, I would say that well, two more things. One, you don’t have to wait for the signing and ratification of this treaty as hard law in the United States to be able to use the Convention in a variety of ways. I testified about two weeks ago before D.C. City Council on a bill that is pending in Washington, D.C., the healthcare for persons with disabilities, regarding services. Others testified on that bill as well. I think that does a lot of good towards recognizing individuals of disabilities and their rights to make fair decisions. In putting my testimony together, I cited other things, the Montreal declaration of rights, and the U.N. Convention. It was very interesting to see the support for this by the council members.
I also think that those of you who have that position, there’s no reason not to cite in that way anything that is helpful. I’m sure many of you know the landmark cases, Wyatt, in that case, Frank Johnson cited retarded persons’ rights in 1971. So that’s something we can begin to do even before we get to the point of ratifying the Convention in the United States.
With that, do we have any time for questions?
ERIC ROSENTHAL: I think we’re probably right on.
ROBERT DINERSTEIN: Okay. Thank you for your attention.
(Applause.)
ERIC ROSENTHAL: Thank you for that very valuable background, panel, and particularly Bob for helping us even though we started late, getting back on schedule to the minute. He has lots of little scrap papers, "two minutes to go."
We are now going to shift. We’re going to hear a keynote presentation from the Honorable Tony Coelho. And then the rest of the afternoon will be facilitated discussion. So we’ve gotten our background panel, and I hope that very much we can look forward to all of us rolling up our sleeves and working together to see how we’re going to get support for the Convention.
I would like to call on Marca Bristo, newly appointed President of the U.S. International Council on Disability, to introduce our keynote speaker.
MARCA BRISTO: Good afternoon. Is this on? Hello?
Good afternoon. It is a tremendous honor for me to introduce a colleague from our movement who needs no introduction. In fact, this person’s right up there with Madonna. There is only one Tony in the disability rights movement. Tony Coelho.
Many of us know the Honorable Tony Coelho as the original cosponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act. That would be enough to earn the respect for our lifetime. After all, Tony responded to the call of Justin Dart and the National Council on Disability to create the first civil rights law on behalf of people with disabilities in the world. Tony responded to that challenge by challenging all of us to come to Washington or write letters to Washington, doing what he called sharing the scar tissue of our lives, to shine a light on the face of discrimination in America. And respond we did.
We are here again today with that same challenge, I suspect, coming from Tony, asking us to roll up our sleeves and move forward. Tony might have just rested on his laurels after the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, but he did not. He continued fighting on, focusing his attention on the shameful legacy of poverty and unemployment as chair of the President’s Committee on the Employment of People with Disabilities, and as cochair of President Clinton’s Task Force on the Rights and Empowerment of People with Disabilities. Throughout it all, Tony has been a friend to many of us, opening doors and offering his sage counsel. He does that not as an outsider, but as a member of the disability rights movement. And he does that well. Fighting now to restore the rights of millions of people with epilepsy, psychiatry disabilities, and others who have seen themselves like himself cut out of the protections of the ADA by the decisions of the Supreme Court. Tony is working quietly and not so quietly to enact the ADA Restoration Act. He and we need all of your help to do that.
As we gather here today, that the juncture, we’re poised to strategize on what the pundits and naysayers say, regarding ratifying a Convention, any Convention, in the United States of America. I can think of no one better to help guide the way than Tony Coelho.
Please help me in welcoming in the words of Justin Dart, a soldier in the revolution of empowerment, the Honorable Tony Coelho.
(Applause.)
TONY COELHO: Thank you, Marca. Thank you very much. I kind of like that. Madonna.
(Laughter.)
I’ll have to tell my kids. They’ll go, yuck. Thank you very much. Nice introduction.
It’s exciting to be here. I remember quite well when we first got started on ADA. I find it fascinating that the bill was introduced in 1988 by Senator Whiker from Connecticut and myself. It was signed into law in July of 1990. For a major civil rights bill to be passed and put into law in two years is historic. Sometimes we don’t really appreciate the significance of that type of action, the swiftness of it and so forth. And the reason that it did occur is because of so many of you in this room. The reason that it occurred is that everybody knew of the injustice that was going on in the United States in regards to people with disabilities. And all that had to happen was the call to justice. All that had to happen was to direct that anger and unhappiness that people had, to let it rise up, and for people with disabilities, for all of us to demand that that anger be addressed. And it was. And it was addressed quickly. It was addressed by conservatives and liberals, democrats and republicans, men and women. It was addressed by people who have disabilities. It was addressed by people who had loved ones with disabilities. It was addressed by people who have neighbors with disabilities. It was addressed by people who had mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and so forth. And can I remember people coming to the House floor and saying, Tony, I want on that bill about disability. I have no idea what’s in it. They just knew about the injustice. They knew about what all of you in this room were telling them about the injustices and what needed to be done to correct them.
Well, you know, the Supreme Court in their infinite wisdom has decided that we did not intend to cover certain people like me who has epilepsy, even though I testified and Congress knew over and over again that it was supposed to be. But they eliminated us. So now we have to correct it. Well, that’s not unusual. The ADA has been very successful. It has changed the way our society has dealt with disabilities. Is it has now had an impact internationally, adopted by several countries across the world. So it’s been hugely successful.
I would assume that the Convention would not even be pursued and developed and taken place if it were not for the ADA. So what we’re now faced with is adopting the ADA Restoration Act, and this speech is not about the ADA Restoration, but I’m getting there. It’s important to get ADA Restoration passed. We’re trying to get it done in this Congress. And the reason that I think it’s important to get it passed for the Convention is that it’s important to get the community active, involved, engaged, uproared again, and say, you need to address this issue again. And get it done. If we can get it done, you get people united, concerned, and you get the Congress addressing our issues again. We sort of went back. We sort of went incommunicado for awhile. And we have to do it again.
If we do that, if we’re successful in getting the ADA Restoration passed, which I think we can do, I am very optimistic, I think we then, in that atmosphere, we set the stage for the Convention. We create the people that can help us get it out. For example, it’s something that is only adopted in the Senate, not the House. I would suggest that in the Senate, we try to get Senator Dick Durbin to lead the way for us. Why? Because he’s the Senate majority whip. He’s from Chicago. He happens to be a good friend of Marca’s. But he is also an extremely effective spokesman. He’s an effective legislator. He will be supportive of what we’re trying to do. And what you need to do is you need to get him engaged, supportive, in the room, and strategizing to get this done. And that should be started now.
And then you should pick another democrat to work with him. I don’t want to make news here, but I would suggest that more than likely Senator Obama will probably win the democratic nomination. So I would suggest that you work with Senator Clinton to work with Senator Harkin. There will be a lot of her colleagues who have a lot of guilt and will want to work on something significantly in order to be involved with her. She would be very effective. She works across the aisle, has a lot of good friends on the republican side, and she can be very helpful. That’s where I would start. I would start with the two of them on the democratic side.
On the republican side, I would look very carefully as to who you start with there. My first suggestion would be Gordon Smith. He understands it from a family point of view. He is credible. He is considered a moderate, not too conservative but not too liberal for the rest of the crowd. And then I would pick somebody else to work with him. I would probably pick Senator Burr from North Carolina. That’s probably where I would go. The reason for that is that he’s credible. He understands the issues. But he’s considered more conservative. He’s from the south. But I would be very careful in the four that I would pick. I would recruit them now, pursue that, and then develop a strategy to go forward.
Why are we in the position that we’re in today? A little bit from the point of view that we have sat back a little bit as a community. We are going on our own with our own issues instead of collectively being together, which happens not only here in the United States, but I assume internationally. But we need to come back together as a community and work together, show that we can get ADA Restoration passed, and so that we have some momentum and credibility, and then take on the Convention.
The fact that the Convention is moving without us is, in one way, a disgrace to us in the U.S. We should be leading that effort. There are people like Judy who started our own disability movement out in California, that wonderful state of ours, but who started that movement and so forth and we are not as engaged in the Convention as we should be. And we should be.
But the fact that the Convention is moving forward I think is a great attribute to the whole disability community nationwide that it is moving. And we need to grab on board and catch up with the movement globally and provide some leadership there. The way to do it, though, is to make sure we have the right people involved in the Senate providing the leadership that is necessary so that we are credible in trying to get it done.
Secondly, how do we get there? There has been a reluctance in the United States Senate for years that’s nothing new to participate in Conventions, the League of Nations. I could go on and on about the difficulties that we have as a country in participating in these activities. There’s also been in the 1980s a movement in our country more conservative. And as we saw in the 1990s, to a great extent, to do it alone. It got us in trouble. I won’t go into all those issues. But it’s got us in trouble internationally. Thank God we see a movement going the other way. And the Convention now is coming at a time when the movement is going the other way. So if you handle how you introduce it with individuals in the Senate and you carefully work with four individuals that you pick I made my suggestions but if you carefully work with those four individuals and strategize with those four individuals, you could make substantial progress. It ain’t gonna be easy. I understand that. It will take a lot of work. It’s going to take unity. It’s going to take the enthusiasm and the direction that we had when we did it ADA originally. And that means getting everybody together, everybody understanding why this is important, why it’s critical for our movement, in order to succeed. It’s going to take a huge, huge grassroots effort to make it. If you try start at the top, if you try to just go to the Senate and get it done without grassroots, you will fail. You will fail.
So what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to start getting some of these senators to be engaged with you, to be involved, to be willing to help lead the effort, and then you’ve got to go out and get the current Justin Darts, to get them engaged, get them involved in the community and build up the support, build up the enthusiasm to make this work. We should be participants. We need to be participants. We need to be involved. We need to lead the world again on the disability movement. We started it to a great extent. I can remember the many times traveling in regards to my particular cause on epilepsy and going to facilities in different countries, including my own country of Portugal where it was a disgrace what happened to those of us with epilepsy there, and we have made great progress. Great progress. But it’s only with focus. It’s only with all of us getting together. It’s only with us making sure that we’re willing to talk about it, making sure we’re united and aggressively pushing that we can make a difference.
Am I optimistic? Yes. Am I enthusiastic? Yes. But most importantly, I’m a realist. I’m a realist in saying that it takes a lot of work. It took us a lot of work to get the ADA done. Interestingly, it had taken us a lot more work to get ADA Restoration done. And I would submit it will take more work to get the Convention done. But it can be done. That’s what’s interesting. It can be done. With unity, with aggressiveness, and I would submit to you making sure that USICD is strong and aggressive. It’s a natural organization to bring it all together. That means everybody has to work to participate with Marca and the organization to make it stronger and more effective. Everybody needs to participate. Everybody needs to be part of the organization and to make it strong.
So collectively, we can do it. Collectively, we can make it happen. If we’re not willing to do that, we shouldn’t waste our time. If we’re not willing to do that, we should applaud the efforts of the international movement and say we’re going to sit on the sidelines this time and not participate. That would be a shame. That would be a disgrace. That would be an embarrassment. I don’t think anybody in this room wants that to happen. So the thing is, let’s get in, let’s make sure that Marca and the group are a success by all of us participating, by all of us talking, and let’s make sure we set the groundwork in regards to getting the support in the Senate as needed, and then developing the grassroots so that they understand the significance of why this Convention needs to be adopted.
I’ll part on one last thing. You can definitely count on me to be part of this effort. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
ERIC ROSENTHAL: Okay. Well, we are actually about 10 minutes early. I think what I would really like to do is proceed straight on to the next panel, because what we want to do is have all the different organizations that are working on this issue have a few minutes to report.
Our next scheduled break is actually at 3:15. So I realize it’s a long time to go without stopping. So anyone who needs to go to the bathroom, feel free to come and go as you wish. There’s still plenty of food. There’s still desserts. So make yourself comfortable.
We will now proceed with our next panel. Jeff Rosen will be facilitating the next panel that will start now. Now, I know one of the people he wanted to call on was Hadar to give us a background on international human rights law and treaties. Since we’re about 10 minutes early, she’s not here yet. But I think, Jeff, we can proceed right into the reports from the different organizations, and when Hadar comes, she’ll be able to come in and do that. And I know that Janet Lord was taking notes on the earlier panel, and we wanted to make sure we had a summary of some of the Convention and the international implications for U.S. law as we proceed with that.
I’ll turn it over now to Jeff Rosen, who will be facilitating our next panel between now and 3:15.
JEFF ROSEN: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Jeff Rosen. I’m general counsel for a telecommunications company. Really, wow, I’m very, very impressed. I feel very pleased to see such a strong turnout today. Not only do we have good advocates, well known advocates here, but also many people who themselves are from the community. I see many people from Gallaudet over here in this area. I see many deaf people. Thank you for coming. I appreciate you all being here. I see a lot of other people from the community also being involved and wanting to be a part of that. That really shows that the Convention is really broadening. It’s such a broad range of people. I’m really happy to be involved.
Now, what we’re going to do for the next hour is really continue to look at some of the background of the Convention, and also hear from several representatives of the large organizations to talk about two different things. One would be why is the Convention important to the members. And also, what your organization does to support the Convention and understanding the different parts and how it all works, to move them all together.
Now I’ll give you a little bit more background about myself. I used to work on the National Council on Disability, and really there I had the honor to work with many good advocates, like Marca, who used to be the chair, and Lex Frieden, the next chair after that, and Joan Durocher, who is here now with the Council. Back then, Marca and I visited Senator Tom Harkin, who discussed about in the Supreme Court decision about Garret. It was really very difficult, problematic. So the ADA really wasn’t a part of it. It was unconstitutional, they said. It was a really big impact. So Senator Harkin said to Marca and myself in a meeting, he said, what are we going to do? What are we going to do about this? So that really was a very difficult moment for me as a civil rights lawyer, because I was thinking to myself, 25 years in practice, and now what am I going to do in this country? I have a very good conservative court with the ADA, and the ADA got less and less. So what are we going to do?
Well, we did. Through the National Council, we had discussions. And many all over through communities, all through the different communities and sectors and different groups. We all came together and had discussions often, and we made an agreement that we need to have an ADA Restoration Act. That’s what we’ve been talking about a lot.
But that’s not all. At the same time, we had a lot of focus on international law. We realized that we couldn’t just be, you know, introspective. We needed to look out in the world also. We needed to become involved and focused and work on international law issues. We had several conference discussions about the development of the Convention. Most of you contributed in that. I see many of you here who helped us out. We had one conference that was presented by our Abraham Lincoln, Justin Dart. He gave a wonderful speech about how the restoration supports all of us in America even though we already have the ADA. And really he sent a very clear message to all, that we can make the connection between ADA and the U.N. Convention.
Now, many of you have been working on the ADA Restoration Act. We’ve made good progress, but now we see the Convention coming into the picture also to understand that they are parallel efforts and they need to be combined and interrelated. Building relationships too. That’s been great. I’ve heard from them and how their relationships are being made here in this country. But first we heard one or two people give background, and we have Hadar, who helped a lot with the workshop. I would like to hear a word from her now.
HADAR HARRIS: Thank you. I’ve never had the opportunity of actually being introduced while watching on a webcast from two floors below and racing up here in time. So thanks, Jeff, for stretching.
My job is to give you a brief overview of international law in 10 minutes but actually less than 10 minutes, and not make it too legalistic. Now, you might venture to guess that that’s a big challenge, being here in the law school and being an international human rights lawyer. But we’ve already heard so many wonderful presentations this morning about the importance of building coalitions and the relevance of the Convention, and I know many are itching to get to the discussion so I’ll make it as brief as possible.
What I want to do is talk just a little bit about definitions of what is a treaty, what are U.N. human rights treaties, how they apply in the United States and the United States deep ambivalence around human rights treaties and what we might be able to expect looking towards strategizing.
First of all, a treaty is an agreement basically most of the time between states which creates international legal obligations. It has duties of compliance and remedies. And look. I already sound far too legalistic. And it creates domestic legal obligations once a treaty is ratified.
There are nine basic core U.N. human rights treaties, as Charlotte alluded to this morning I guess it was this afternoon. We’ll say this morning.
The core U.N. human rights treaties deal with a variety of issues. All of them emanate from the basic document of the universal declaration of human rights, which we are celebrating the 60th anniversary this year. They are core treaties on the right to vote, the right to due process, the right to life and liberty, right to education, health, work, the women’s rights convention, the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the Convention on the Rights of Children, Convention against Torture, Inhumane, and Degrading Treatment and Punishment, and a convention of migrant workers. That makes up the seven core treaties. Then there are two additional human rights treaties which are not yet operational. There is the International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which just kind of rolls off the tongue, and then there is the Convention we are discussing today, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
We call these core treaties because each of these treaties have an oversight committee which is made up of independent experts. Each treaty actually has its own rules of procedure and therefore has a different number of experts that sits on the committee. But because they have this oversight committee, they actually review compliance with the countries who ratify the treaty. And countries who ratify these treaties have an obligation to report to this independent body on a periodic basis to discuss how they are complying with the treaty.
This review process is extremely important in terms of trying to enforce these obligations and this treaty. There are, as you think about the core treaties that I talked about, you might think that there are some missing, some that you are familiar with, like the genocide Convention. The genocide Convention is not considered to be one of the core U.N. human rights treaties because it doesn’t have one of these oversight mechanisms.
So the CRPD definitely falls within that category because it is envisioned that there will be this oversight committee to make recommendations for those countries that do ratify and comply with the treaty, on advising states parties, or what we call the members of the Convention, on how to better implement the treaty.
Another function of these independent expert committees is sometimes to review compliance, to make recommendations, and to hear individual petitions. Now, in the CRPD, there isn’t a provision specifically for individual petitions or individual complaint mechanisms.
(Alarm ringing.)
Don’t worry. That was my time, telling me that my time is up.
There is, however, what is called an optional protocol, which does provide for individual petitions to be considered. What is required, however, is that a country not only ratify the core treaty but also independently ratify the optional protocol. So as Charlotte mentioned this morning, we can’t leave the optional protocol off of our advocacy agenda, because both the core traditions of the treaty need to be ratified and the optional protocol.
So how does this apply to the United States? In order for a human rights treaty to be adopted by the United States, it needs to be both signed and ratified. The President is the one who signs it. And the Senate ratifies it. In this country, you need two thirds of the Senate to approve ratification. We go back to our high school civics classes that everyone has forgotten, but it becomes extremely relevant when we talk about strategies.
80% of the member states of the United Nations have ratified four or more human rights treaties out of these nine treaties. The United States is not in that 80%. We have only ratified three of the nine major human rights treaties. We have an ambivalent relationship to treaties. We ratified the Convention on the elimination of racial discrimination, the Convention against torture, and the international covenant on civil and political rights. Those have only been ratified, the first one in 1992.
We have, however, signed but not ratified three additional treaties. We signed the women’s human rights Convention, the economic rights Convention, and the Convention on the rights of the child. Before you get too excited about that, though, realize that we are one of only two countries in the entire world not to have ratified the Convention on the rights of the child. The other one being Somalia. So we are in such good company there. We have to keep that in mind as we think about strategizing around ratification, the up hill battle that there will be, and thinking very strategically and building allies with other communities, seeking ratification for other treaties as well.
The fact that we’ve signed and not ratified some treaties, though, is important because we still are obligated once we have signed the treaty to behave in a way that does not undermine what we call the object or the purpose of the treaty. So we have to act as if we’re complying with the treaty. We can’t do anything that overtly violates or disagrees with the treaty. So signing is a very good first step. And ratification comes next.
The other kind of kicker in this process is that the United States has always, when ratifying a human rights treaty, there’s three treaties that we have ratified and even the ones that we have signed, placed what are called reservations on the signature or ratification of the treaty. A country is able to put a reservation, an understanding or a declaration on to the signature or ratification of a treaty. It’s the good news and the bad news, because a reservation is made by a state in order to exclude or alter the legal effect of certain provisions of the treaty in its application to the state. It would be like the United States saying, as it does around the torture Convention, that our understanding of what cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment is, as written in the treaty, is our understanding of what the 8th amendment says cruel and unusual punishment is here. So that treaty complies with U.S. constitutional law rather than U.S. constitutional law changing to comply with the treaty. It’s kind of an ironic twist there. Many attorneys would say that is problematic. Yet at the same time, the whole device RUDs was developed in order to build consensus around documents that are deliberately broad in order to allow for interpretation and also to allow for consensus. Because treaties are written, and many of you were involved in the drafting of the CRPD. You know that a consensus driven drafting process puts certain things into the treaty and leaves a lot out of the treaty that you might want to be more specific around. But the vagueness of the treaty allows for more states to actually ratify the treaty. It allows the state to accept the treaty as a whole with modifications or provisions.
One other example of how the United States uses reservations is in every single ratification of a treaty, they have put in a reservation that says that the treaty itself is not self executing, which means that it cannot be directly applied as a cause of action in U.S. domestic courts. It means that there needs to be domestic implementation, requiring separate implementing legislation. And although Article VI of the U.S. Constitution makes treaties the supreme law of the land, the fact that there is this reservation around nonself executing means that there needs to be specific legislation passed in order to implement it.
In the case of the CRPD, one can make the argument that the ADA already exists, that there are ways to make ratification easy for this government, whether it is this administration or the next administration. The very fact of the consensus driven drafting of the treaty and the broad outlines of the treaty itself enables us to think about and strategize for ratification in a way that will be broad and will stress to the two thirds of the Senate that we need to have supporting this effort that it is an easy thing to do and will not require additional specific implementing legislation, even if we as an advocacy community believe that this will give us a tool push for additional legislation later. So there are many wonderful things that can be used. There’s much that can be learned from other communities who are trying to move forward ratification of the women’s Convention, of the Convention on the rights of the child. And as we as a community look forward to strategizing, we’re not alone in this initiative in it trying to get this treaty ratified. Others have come before us and have worked very hard on ratification for other treaties, and first the people in this room and others will strategize around what we want to do and the strategies that we want to implement, but I hope that we will also look to the experiences of others who have worked very hard and continue to work hard on ratification efforts for the other treaties to learn from them and work in coalition with them as well.
So that was a brief rundown of international laws, treaties, and nobody seems to be asleep. So I think that bodes well for hearing from many of the activists who have already been involved in ratification efforts on a local and national level. Thank you.
(Applause.)
JEFF ROSEN: Thank you for that great background. Thank you. I appreciate that. I learned a lot myself. Thank you. I appreciate your time.
The next speaker is Janet Lord, independent consultant. She will talk about the various impacts of the Convention. Please come up.
(Applause.)
JANET LORD: Thank you, Jeff. Great thanks to Eric Rosenthal and his team at MDRI for putting this very important meeting together and to Robert Dinerstein at the Washington College of Law. And I will say to the people asking me where should one study human rights law, look no further than Washington College of Law. It produces MDRI, facilitated its great work. And I didn’t go to Washington College of Law, by the way, so the work that you all are doing here is terrific and really important.
So I’ve been asked very briefly to encapsulate some of the key points that have been raised by our distinguished speakers who have come before me. And it seems to me that as Hadar set forth, we are at a very interesting place in terms of treaty practice in the United States. While we are here today talking of U.S. ratification of the U.N. disability Convention, indeed it is important to set this particular goal against the broader context of the United States participation in treaties, and we are curiously in the practice recently of not putting pen to paper, but removing pen from paper. We have distinguished ourselves by unsigning, for example, the very old 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. And so we might think it a very tall order indeed to talk today of ratifying the U.N. disability Convention. However, I think as all of the panelists here today have set forth, and it being a very persuasive case, we may not be deterred. It is plausible and realistic to look at the United States both as a signatory of this Convention and a state party by way of ratification. This is not the sort of utopia or in our wildest dreams scenario. It will take hard work. It will take unity, as our panelists have all underscored. But it is within reach.
As Professor Dinerstein laid out, if you look at drafting and text of the U.N. disability Convention, you will see that much of its core content is in keeping with U.S. federal legislation, from the principle from many of the points that Charlotte raised in her presentation, the social model of disability, the guiding principles that were set forth in Article III of the Convention, nondiscrimination, full participation and inclusion in society, quality of opportunity and accessibility, all of these things are reflected not only in the ADA but the full federal disability law. We have a long way to go in terms of full implementation, but if we are thinking about the realism of the United States signing and then ratifying this convention, as the panelists have made very clear, we are not starting from ground one.
Our two very distinguished Humphreys fellows made some wonderful presentations regarding the unique challenges but also opportunities as some other countries in the international community base with regard to signing and then ratifying and seeing implemented the U.N. disability Convention. And there we have, in the case of Tunisia, issues regarding the insufficiency of Tunisia law and that there is a great need for law development in that context. And so too in the Egyptian context, it was noted the many challenges but also the opportunities for ratification, and the opportunities for strengthening the existing legal framework that is in Egypt, and prompting more effective national law and policy making more in line with the U.N. disability Convention. And I can say just from my own experience of working in some other countries, it is a very huge challenge. You take a country that has absolutely no disability law framework, the prospects for ratification and implementation, it’s a tough hurdle. There are a lot of groups doing fabulous work but they have a lot of work to do in order to lay the most basic groundwork for disability law and ratification of the Convention. And in other places where you have a legal framework, I was in Russia a couple weeks ago. They have a lot of law and policy around disability issues, and it is fundamentally disaligned with the U.N. disability convention. So their advocates are facing a very tall order in completely doing away with some of the really problematic disability law that they do have and replacing it with something much more aligned with the U.N. disability convention.
So I think all of our panelists contributed in setting the way for our ongoing discussions this afternoon. Being mindful that we have an opportunity here to see the United States do what it should do and stand in solidarity with countries around the world, pressing for ratification. We need to reach out to our allies in a strategic way, as our keynote speaker encouraged us to do, and as one of my favorite human rights advocates, Eleanor Roosevelt, said we need to know that human rights start in small places close to home. Even in humans ratification developing countries, which the United States unfortunately is. So all of the speakers have set forth the view that in their view, the Convention is something that is worthwhile to put our efforts into in terms of ratification in the United States. It’s an awareness raising tool. It’s an empowerment tool. And indeed it could be a tool for pressing toward greater ADA implementation over time.
So we need to thank all of our panelists. We have an opportunity before us. We have a responsibility before us. We need to come together in a unified way and find out the best way, the best path, towards seeing the United States both sign and ratify this convention. Thank you.
(Applause.)
JEFF ROSEN: Thank you, Janet. I really appreciate you making that connection between what is actually happening. I depend on many of the advocates to really making the connection.
Our next speaker is someone who is really a good friend of all of ours, who helped lead our efforts on the Convention. It’s my pleasure to welcome Tomas Lagerwall. Would you please come up?
(Applause.)
TOMAS LAGERWALL: Thank you so much, Jeff. Thank you to the organizers. It’s an honor to be here today. I was also here one year ago. So it’s becoming an inspiration, which I hope you will follow. I hope we can also celebrate today the United States signing and ratifying a Convention.
I will talk not so much about the situation in the United States. Up on the screen now, you have a photo. I will try to describe it for people who cannot see it. It is from a March 13th signing ceremony at the United Nations general assembly hall. I think one of the people in the disability community is here today. I don’t see the other speaker here, Maria Reyna, but I’m sure her spirit is with us.
And the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, CRPD for brief, as you know was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 2006. Until Friday. And I think we have to be careful here because I can’t say now. Something may happen today. But 126 countries of 192 members of the United Nations have signed the Convention. That is a record. Never have so many countries signed a convention in such a short time. 71 have signed the optional protocol as of last week. 17 countries have ratified the Convention, and 11 the optional protocol.
Now, here is the challenge for us. We need 20 ratifications before the Convention is enforced. We are taking a risk here, which I will come back to soon. Before doing that, I will give you a little bit of background on what is happening in the United Nations. The United Nations has many offices and so on. The one we have been working with, those of us who have been in the Convention negotiations, is the United Nations development department of social affairs in New York. This is a human rights convention, which means it will technically be based in Geneva, Switzerland. In order not to compete with each other and have misunderstandings, those two units have decided to work together. In my picture here, you see people walking up and down, the people in Geneva and in New York working together, not competing with each other.
IDA is the international disability alliance. To not take too much time, I won’t go into details. In my organization, RI, we are part of this group. I know at least one person in this room is one of the core members of IDA, Tina. You can supplement if you want to later on.
We have 1 million U.S. dollar grant from the Swedish development agency which makes it possible for us to arrange meetings and hold training seminars. For example, in May/June last year, we had a training seminar in Panama for a couple of hundred people from all over the world on the implementation of the Convention. As you probably know, it’s the driving force for the Convention, America. As your neighbors to the south, really thanks to them we have the convention today.
By the way, I should say this photo is quite important. IDA is meeting with the leadership of WHO. And again, sorry for those of you who can’t see, but the third lady on the right in the background is the director general of WHO. There’s not so much NGO groups who manage to get a meeting with her. She really was commit to the course of disability and ensured that WHO shifts its focused from medically oriented to a rights based organization, which is very unique and important for us.
We have decided to set up another mechanism in IDA. I think it’s important to see what is happening between the international disability community. This is called the IDA CRDP forum. Organizations work in complying with the Convention and what the status is. They’re welcome to join this group. There will be a listserv for any individuals interested in following this work. This is following the example of what was called the IDC, which was the international caucus supporting the Convention.
We also have working groups on specific issues such as legal rights. Tina may talk about that.
There is a steering committee of 15 people from organizations, global and regional disability organizations, plus various networks represented here today. So there are disability communities and other groups enrolled.
In the IDA chair, it is also the chair of the IDA CRDP forum, to ensure there is no competition. It is in support of the European disability forum, which is the regional network in Europe.
The IDA CRDP forum together with the U.N. secretary will on May 12 hold a celebration for the Convention entering the force. There will be statements, I hope not too many, celebrations and many other things happening. I will hope we will see hundreds of diplomats, the media, press coverage, and most of you being there, because this is really a historic moment.
But here we have a challenge. As you heard previously, there are 17 countries ratified so far. We need 20 before the end of next week. I’m hoping our friend from Tunisia will get Tunisia to ratify. Ecuador will most likely ratify this week. I think Jordan is about to ratify. There may be other countries also. But this is very important. We need to have 20 ratifications before the end of next week.
RI, my local organization, I hope you don’t mind my doing that. RI is a global organization which I will come back to soon. I want to say a few words about what we are doing. This is what we are doing. We have a global advocacy campaign with information activities and advocacy to politicians, decision makers, U.N., and others, to encourage signing of ratification. We have capacity building and networking sessions, and we have research going on where we assist countries in finding out how or to what extent will their legislation comply with the Convention. And I have much more to say about that. There are some flyers up here if you want to know more about this activity, and there is also a CD and a number of fact sheets we are doing also on the table outside. One of the important things we are doing is on April 15 and 16 in Mexico, there will be a conference on the signing ratification and implementation of the Convention. I think this is important. This started, as you know, in South America, so I think we should build on their support.
Finally, one slide about RI. We have about 1,000 members in our organization and close to 100 countries all over the world. USICD, one of the organizers here today, joined with DPI in the United States. The photo is not from the United States.
I hope this background gives an idea not only about what my organization, RI, is doing, but more important, what some of us are doing in the international field, which is very important. We applaud and congratulate you in your efforts in the United States. Thank you.
(Applause.)
JEFF ROSEN: I wanted to mention something that I think was left off. That after 7 years of fabulous service to RI, he will be leaving. So I wanted to say, we will miss you, my friend, but I don’t think you’ll be missed. You will still be involved. I know you’re a great advocate. Thank you for your support.
(Applause.)
Our next speaker is someone that I have great fortune to work with on a national committee, when we worked together with Senator Harkin. They were the chair of the national committee on disabilities. And we focused on the ADA, the international issue. That was parallel. So now the new president of USICD, I would like to welcome Marca Bristo to say a few words.
MARCA BRISTO: There’s a lumpy carpet over here. Be careful. On behalf of USICD, I would like to thank everybody who coparticipated in putting this together. Especially our late president, Eric Rosenthal. Thank you.
(Applause.)
USICD is an organization that has been around for quite some time, advocating on policy issues on behalf of those of us in the United States who have an interest in international work. We’re a federation of disabled persons organizations, government agencies, service organizations, and individuals, all working together to reform our U.S. policy to make it more consistent with the vision of the Americans with Disabilities Act. As the new president, we’re going to be focusing on three primary areas. First and probably most important, developing an equal grassroots effort on international issues. As you heard from Tony, developing the grassroots, hard at work fighting their own struggles like inadequate housing and transportation systems, it’s a long ride from there to getting the passion around these issues.
Second, reshaping our U.S. public policy to make it more inclusive of people with disabilities, particularly in the areas of foreign assistance. We’ve had some victories in this area. Last year or the year before, it required the reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq be linked to the Americans with Disabilities Act standards for more rigorous standards in their country. And this year we were successful in getting a congressional earmark to really begin to do some inclusive development of disability organization on the ground in certain developing countries.
And finally, ratification. We were asked to speak about what our respective organizations are doing in this particular area. I think Eric, vice chair, and myself and I would like to ask the other USICD board members who are here to just raise your hand. There you are. And also Tony Coelho is a new member of our board. We stand ready to assist this effort in whatever way the group sees fit. I think what we bring to the table is the richness of our ability to reach to our member organizations and all of their organizations. We are growing. We are really working hard to establish our capacity to. That end, we have membership forums that are here, that will be distributed later. I would really encourage you if you would like to stay connected, to consider becoming a more active member.
And in an ongoing way, to convene these kinds of meetings, not only here in Washington but all around the country. As it relates to the more specific ratification role, we wanted to wait until this meeting was over. Eric will be heading up a committee at USICD that will lead our efforts. I’m trusting that with the able leadership of Bobby Silverstein, we will come out for the better. Thank you.
(Applause.)
HADAR HARRIS: Just a quick announcement about the microphones. Whoever is coming forward to speak, or if you are speaking in the interactive session, you want to make sure that the green light is on. Just press it very lightly. There’s a button here. Make sure the green light is flashing and then you can hear me. If it’s not, you can’t hear me. This is new technology. We’re just figuring it out ourselves. Thanks for bearing with us.
JEFF ROSEN: I don’t know if there’s anything in sign language to give people the ability to see me better, like microphones. I don’t know if there’s any magnification system. But anyway, thank you for those comments. I’m going to do a brief introduction. We had an opportunity to work with Michelle on the committee for disability as well. It’s been wonderful working with you. And with this Convention on disability, we wanted to see what’s next. And Michelle emailed me saying, hey, why don’t we go ahead and do a grassroots organization to support the ratification of the treaty. And I agreed. So we went ahead and set that up. Ratify Raw. I’m really proud of our efforts. Thank you to Michelle for that. Thank you.
(Applause.)
MICHELLE MAGAR: Thank you everyone. It’s a pleasure to be here. And our name is not Ratify Raw. It’s RatifyNow.
We are an organization whose mission is to provide grassroots support for advocates all over the world who are working first to persuade their nations to ratify and then to enforce the treaty. We plan to work in cooperation with the other organizations that are here today, including IDA and IDA’s new CRPD forum and also USICD and all the other groups around the world working towards this effort.
We’re pretty new. We’ve only been around a few months. But in that time, we’ve managed to do quite a lot. We have a website, and it’s been growing steadily. It’s ratifynow.org. I encourage all of you to visit it. We hope to make it a tool kit that advocates all over the world can use to work in their own nations for ratification. And at this point, we’re up to 100 hits a day that we’re getting from about two thirds in the U.S. and a third international. We have an active listserv that I would like to offer for this effort here in the United States to work towards ratification as a communication network. And anyone in this room is welcome to join us. Membership is free, and you can join via the website.
One of the new things that we’ve done that I just heard about this week which is very exciting is that one of our members, Sylvia Caras has managed to make ratification part of the California democratic platform. So we’re very happy about that. Andrea Shettle, who is here today, has organized a blog forum. We got a bunch of nations in addition to the U.S. to write blogs that talk about the importance of ratification, and we’ve gotten them placed on websites all over the world to mark the one year anniversary, which was yesterday of when the treaty was opened up for signature.
We are going to be writing a sign on letter that we’re going to distribute throughout the United States human and civil rights community. That will be signed first by disabled people’s organizations, but we want to make it very clear that it is much more than our community that stands to benefit from ratification. And we want to get everybody on board, and we’re going to do that via a sign on letter. We’ll take that sign on letter and present it to the Senate, because at the same time that the United Nations and IDA will be celebrating on May 12th the day that the treaty goes into force, we here in Washington, D.C., will be presenting a Senate and press briefing on ratification, and we’re going to present this letter to the Senate and to the press so that everyone understands that the very first time we’re coming to the Senate, that it’s not just a disability community but it’s us and our allies, all of us want ratification.
We have also started the ball rolling with the national campaign to get local governments to pass resolutions in support of the treaty, and I would like to go ahead and introduce Pam Vanderveer, who you’re about to see on the video. She has taken charge of this national campaign. We hope it build excitement via this video to get ratification local initiatives in support of ratification in every state of the union by the end of this year so we can present that to the incoming administration. So I will sit down now and let you view a very short, three minute video by Pam who will explain how we’re going to go about doing that. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
(Video.)
PAM VANDERVEER: Hello everyone. I’m Pam VanderVeer and I’m leading RatifyNow’s Local Initiatives Project. Our goal with this project is to build grassroots support for the CRPD through the passage of resolutions at the city, county and district levels.
One of the biggest challenges that we face here in the US is a general lack of awareness of the treaty and its significance. The ratifynow local initiatives project aims to address that awareness deficit by encouraging grassroots action in support of the treaty.
Since this project began shortly after the treaty opened for signatures a year ago, 10 local governing bodies have passed supporting resolutions. This list includes the cities of Chicago, San Francisco, CaMDRIdge, Portland, Oregon, and the original supporting municipality of Santa Cruz. Additionally the counties of Multnomah Oregon and Santa Cruz California passed companion resolutions to their sister cities.
An exciting aspect of this project is the fact that the longer the list grows of localities supporting the Convention, the easier the process becomes to convince subsequent ones to follow suit. We also know of an additional 6 resolution initiatives currently in process.
Over the past 6 months, this project has been gaining ever greater momentum, and we expect it to continue to do so during the next year, especially following the treaty entering into force in mid-May. Ratify now’s goal for this project is to achieve at least 50 local resolutions in support of the treaty. We hope that by the next administration in January 2009 to have at least 1 resolution from a grassroot’s constituency in each state.
Although admittedly ambitious, we believe that a supporting resolution from each state, together, will create a powerful enticement for the next administration to sign the treaty and then for congress to move it through the ratification process quickly.
Now I’d like to talk briefly about the local initiatives process we’ve developed. All the info on the local initiatives project, including this video and links to other resources can be found on the ratifynow.org website under the local initiatives project page. This page is a growing resource kit providing all the needed components to easily achieve success.
Among the materials available are the resolutions that have been passed to date, sample letters used to introduce the crpd and officially request support, and examples of testimony given before local council. We also provide examples, step by step, of the process used to achieve local support from first contact through resolution adoption. The project page on our site also contains tips and advice for locating, identifying and determining the members of your local governance, points of contact, and appropriate channels of communication.
Please feel free to contact us at Ratify Now if you need any assistance with the process.
Again, we found that attaining local support for this treaty is surprisingly easy and is getting easier with each subsequent success.
In addition to directly assisting advocates in approaching their local governments, the local initiatives project is also seeking to partner with dpos and other community entities to do outreach to the advocacy community. We welcome referrals and would be happy to assist in any way we can to broaden the reach of the project’s audience.
Please feel free to contact Ratify now or myself directly with any questions you may have about the local initiatives project. You can reach me through the listserve, and/or email me at local.initiatives.project@ratifynow.org .
Again, please visit our website for more detailed information and to view the materials we’ve developed.
Thank you, and together we can put the crpd squarely on the disability community’s radar and thereby ensure our country’s ratification of the treaty in the near future.
I hope that the strategy session is fruitful. I wish we could be there with you.Thank you.
(Applause.)
JEFF ROSEN: Thank you, Michelle. It sounds like Tony was very clear in saying that the ratification won’t happen without the grassroots people like her. Those are the people who make it happen. It’s great.
Now, the next person we have has been a long time involved with disability issues at the U.N. and the committee so far and the Congress. Been a very strong advocate for disabilities, including the mental health group. So I would like to say welcome to Tina.
(Applause.)
TINA MINKOWITZ: Hi, everyone. My name is Tina Minkowitz. Many of you know me as the cochair of the World Network of Survivors and Users of Psychiatry, which I still am. The World Network brings together members from over 50 countries who are users and survivors of psychiatry, which is people who have experienced madness or mental illness or mental health problems rather or who have survived mental health services.
I am here today representing the human rights strategic working group, which is a group of users and survivors of psychiatry in the U.S., many of whom have worked on the Convention at the U.N. There’s people from some of the important psychiatric survivor groups in this country, such as My Freedom International, the Mental Patients Liberation Alliance, and The Freedom Center, among others. And we came together, we actually started with a meeting, a small retreat center for activists in started out New York State. We were joined by people from Massachusetts, and what we’re hoping to do is to really expand and to build more alliances and to have, to encourage more of the grassroots effort and to join with people in other parts of the country from the use and survivor movement, working on ratification efforts now.
What I want to say, the most important thing that I can say here today, is we are not a footnote to the disability movement, and we were an integral part of creating the treaty. We were part of the steering committee of the International Disability Caucus. I served as the chair of the international disability alliance during part of the time when the Convention was being created, and we got some really important provisions into the Convention that will revolutionize the way that people with psycho/social disabilities are treated under the law of every country, including the United States. Now, I’ve heard people here saying, with all due respect to the ADA, I’ve heard people saying that the laws in the U.S. are all from the social model. The ADA is a great law, but then aside from the ADA, there’s a whole series of disgusting mental health laws that exist in every state that are absolutely medical model, that are absolutely coercive, that authorize the government to take my freedom away if they think that I am mentally ill and somebody thinks I’m going to be dangerous, okay? If any of you think that I’m dangerous to you, you don’t have to talk to me, but you do have to acknowledge my human rights, as I have to acknowledge yours. That just because a person may have a disability or be labeled with a disability, nobody has the right to judge me or take away my freedom on that basis.
And there are laws in every state in this country, just as there are in every other country in the world, that authorize the governments to do this. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities takes completely the opposite point of view. Among the principles, there’s a principle that recognizes individual autonomy and the freedom to make one’s own choices. It addresses guaranteeing human rights and fundamental freedoms, all the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all persons with disabilities. Article 12 talks about legal capacity being recognized on an equal basis for all persons. Instead of putting in a guardian or allowing the court to make decisions for us, we have the right to make our own decisions and we have a right to be provided with support that we might need in making decisions, but this support is not to make decisions for us but to help us in making decisions if that’s what we need. We have an equal right under the Convention to liberty, and disability may not be used as a basis to deprive us of liberty. We have a right to healthcare and to respect for our physical and mental integrity.
I want to note that the United Nations secretary for the Convention has just acknowledged that this U.N. convention supersedes an earlier document called the principles for protection of persons with mental illness in areas where they conflict. That document has been severely criticized by the world network of users and survivors of psychiatry and other organizations because it endorses these forced treatment laws, that the Convention now says have to be changed. So it’s very significant. The U.N. is acknowledging the Convention supersedes this. They haven’t said how. It’s still our work to really elucidate what the Convention obligates governments to do, but it’s very significant; they’re acknowledging that the Convention supersede there’s earlier one that has been so criticized.
So the main thing that I just need to communicate here, users and survivors of psychiatry were part of creating the Convention, including some of us in the U.S. who, you know, not to blow my own horn, but I was active in every part of the work on the Convention, and there are several other activists from the United States who are users and survivors of psychiatry who were involved. We need to be involved in every step of the ratification campaign. Our issues cannot be left out or put on the back burner. We need to strategize together about what’s the best way to get ratification to happen but we will not separate ratification on the basis of legal capacity, in world network and in the IDA and the legal capacity task force, we’ve been working with people all over the world who oppose reservations on Article 12, and there are legal experts from all over the world who are starting to take the position that the reservation on that article is incompatible with the object and purpose of the treaty. So this is a very serious issue. It’s a challenge for all of us. And I look forward to working with this whole group again and working together.
Just one more note. When we worked together in the IDC, the disability caucus at the U.N., we had the Convention principle that the convention should be equally relevant to all people with disabilities irrespective of geographical location or type of disability. That was a core principle of our solidarity with each other, and I expect that we can do the same thing here to really work to get something that’s equally relevant to all people with disabilities. Thank you.
(Applause.)
Sorry. I have materials from the human rights strategic working group in this green folder. For people who need it in an alternate format, there’s a CD that has everything in the alternate format.
(Applause.)
JEFF ROSEN: Those comments were wonderful. I really appreciated your clear message. Thank you for that, for being a champion.
I know you’ve heard me. I married a Swedish woman. A very famous name for making the clock run on time. I’m very famous for that. So we have about 7 or 8 minutes left. We have 3 speakers left. So we’re going to go to Bob. The next speaker is someone who is a champion of disability community. A good friend of mine too. He has a really strong history of development for people that have disabilities. Like for example, that woman on the videotape, that was in AAPD, that article recently, I really appreciate having our friend here who also strongly supports the Convention of our working together and a coalition. So welcome, Andy. Come on up.
(Applause.)
ANDY IMPARATO: Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Eric. And thank you to WCL for hosting this event. Our organization is a national membership organization. Our mission is to organize the disability community so we have more power politically, socially, and economically. Our interest in the Convention is primarily to use it as an organizing tool in the U.S., along very much the lines of what Tony Coelho talked about. He’s the vice chair of our board.
To date, we’ve partnered with several other organizations and sent questions to all the presidential candidates, including a specific question on whether they would sign the U.N. Convention and support ratification on the U.N. Convention, and we did get responses from the candidates on the democratic side. We are still waiting for Senator McCain’s response but we have not given up on getting that commitment before the election. We have a strong commitment from Senator Obama, and I’m told we have one from Senator Clinton although I have not seen that in writing.
Another thing, we have a petition on the internet where we gave individuals an opportunity to sign a petition calling on President Bush to sign the Convention. That’s been signed to date by over 3,000 individuals. Everybody who signed that gave us their contact information in order to be registered as having signed it. So that’s an organizing tool right there that we can use to go back to folks. We’re excited about RatifyNow. We’ve sent out on our listserv justice for all, promoting RatifyNow. We also have an NPR affiliated website. We’ve had RatifyNow folks take our calls.
We’re a platform and we have resources. Our interest is in using this Convention to build a stronger cross disability civil rights community where everybody is equal along the lines that Tina talked about. And just I have to say personally as a person with a psychiatric disability, I am very proud of Tina and the work that your coalition have done on the Convention. To me, this is exactly where the psychiatric disability community needs to be when talking about civil and human rights. Same thing with people with intellectual disabilities. To me, that’s where the biggest human rights violations are happening in this country every day. If we’re not working together to try to address them around the world, and in this country, it’s a huge missed opportunity. Thank you very much for having me.
(Applause.)
JEFF ROSEN: Okay. All the organizations that we want to hear from, is landmine to survive. So the network the survivors network. Are you here? Come on up.
SPEAKER: I’m from Landmine Survivors Network. Landmine Survivors Network is singularly the most narrowly targeted group in this room. Hand in hand with the campaign to ban landmines, we promote the survivors voices, and bringing the voice of survivors to the forefront as the most effective in lobbying for the actual ban, empowering them to advocate for their recovery, and also spreading methods of peer support as ways to accelerate recovery.
Real advocacy has a life of its own. Once our advocacy focused on barriers in society. Very quickly, there was no choice but to advocate for disability rights at large. This is where our networks, which are placed in countries around the world, originally centered around the issue of landmines are advocating widely for disabilities in general. There’s a gap between national laws or the lack of national laws and ratification, where there’s a big gap between what happens locally, and it’s difficult for one country to ratify. Or if it ratifies, what is its intention in actually implementing. These are the questions our networks are dealing with locally and continue to advocate for disability rights in these countries.
This is past. I would like to talk about present and future. Our name is changing to Survivor Corps. Understanding that the exclusion of people with disabilities is a case of exclusion manifesting it self towards other groups in society. By our own work, we are at the second stage, which are actually contained in the name, Survivor Corps, where we apply methodologies and principles that we gained to implement around landmine issues and disability to help society to help survivors reintegrate into society.
So how does disability figure in this wider mission that we have? I have a few anecdotes in 2 minutes. One of them is about a workshop we held recently in Colombia, a disability rights workshop, where an ex guerrilla was pushed by his colleagues to present on a panel, present the issue of people with physical disabilities. He was advocating about this role he was assigned because after this workshop, he was head over heels interested in advocating for the rights of guerrillas, for healthcare. So actually going beyond the divide both of military and civil divide, and the origin of disability.
The second anecdote, the ink hasn’t dried on CRPD and yet it’s one of the most interesting draft treaty underway. Within this treaty, the CRPD is a point that as the body of international law, to govern the administering of the existence to survivors. So here we are. We have a treaty from a completely different world starting a draft, which is referring to a draft, not the CRPD. This is a hint of disability rights as a vehicle to transcend more than the barriers.
Revisiting the U.S., along these lines, we are now initiating a project to work on the issue of tens of thousands of wounded veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom are wounded and have a disability. And as in other parts of the world, those not aligned with the disability rights movement. Our goal is to have them join this issue.
Later on in this session, we would like to suggest revisiting the Convention from a larger view perspective of the survivor movement and to reach the CRPD mess tooth all people with disabilities and beyond people with disabilities.
(Applause.)
JEFF ROSEN: Okay. Now, also, we have a few words from one of our strong representatives and award winner, Eric.
(Applause.)
ERIC ROSENTHAL: Thank you very much. I would like to talk to you briefly about the work of Mental Disability Rights International, the organization I head. I’ll mention that I’m also Vice President of the U.S. International Council on Disability, so I’m working with Marca and other members of USICD as part of the umbrella efforts to bring different disability groups together to work on this issue in the United States. So to the extent that MDRI works organizationally, we are committed to working through USICD and I hope in collaboration with all of the other organizations we have here today.
Mental Disability Rights International is committed to working to bring the protections of international human rights law to ensure that governments are held accountable for human rights abuses against people with mental disabilities everywhere. We have worked in 23 different countries, mostly in South America, and in central and eastern Europe. Allison Hillman is here. Can you stand up for a second? She’s the director of our project of the Americas.
(Applause.)
She’s done amazing work in those areas and recently came back from Argentina, where we released a report and helped set up a psychiatric survivor advocacy group there. She’s also sued the government of Paraguay.
I’ll also mention Paul Miller is also here. Paul is putting on a conference in Seattle at the end of April to look at international human rights and the disability Convention in the Asia pacific region. At the end of this conference, there’s going to be a follow up to this meeting here, a west coast follow up, to discuss the recommendations that we have come up with at the end of the day here today so that we can bring them to the work of the west coast disability movement and make sure that there’s a kind of next step on the west coast.
Mental Disability Rights International, as you know, has documented abuses and brought worldwide attention to human rights abuses around the world. We are every bit as committed to protecting the rights of people with mental disabilities here in the United States. So you’ve turned on your television a few times over the last few years and seen the reports of our exposes in other parts of the world, and I’m hoping it’s not too long before you turn on your television and see some of the abuses that are unfortunately happening right here in the United States. There are terrible, terrible abuses happening in the United States, and we should be held accountable to the same international human rights law as every other country. We should be held to professions under the covenant on civil and political rights, the Convention on torture, as well as the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It’s absolutely essential that the United States ratify this treaty to ensure that those protections are applied to our own citizens with disabilities.
One other note. Much of today’s discussion has been on the implications of the Convention within the United States. What I want to bring home is that our citizenship in the world, the U.S.’s role in the world in terms of standing up for basic international human rights will be gravely affected in the United States fails to ratify this Convention. Our credibility will be shot as disability advocates, trying to work abroad, when we ourselves are not willing to say that we will abide by the international standards that are underpinning the U.N. Convention on the rights of people with disabilities. It is profoundly important for the U.S.’s participation in the world that we ratify this convention. I have a horrible memory of two years ago when I was visiting an abusive psychiatric facility in rural Romania. It was a facility guarded by men with rifles. We knocked on the door, we finally talked to them, pleaded with them to let us in. Once we got in, they were delaying us at the door because we saw people lined up, their clothing literally covered with feces and urine. They were stripping them naked and putting them in a group shower. They didn’t want to let us in until they had showered collectively the population. Finally, when we got in it, windows were broken, it was freezing outside, people were huddled under covers. It was a horrible nightmarish scene. I pride myself on going to some of the worst abuses everywhere in the world, keeping my cool. I happen to know if you’re going to bring about change, you’ve got keep your powder dry, do your documentation, and then when you can, with maximum punch, use every lever of power that you can to hold governments accountable. So I rarely lose it. But in this psychiatric facility in Romania, I lost it. I got so angry, I started scream being at the director of this facility. There was a blue flag of the European Union flying. We thought we had leverage that Romania wanted to join the EU. And I said to the director, "How can you expect Romania to be admitted to the EU when you don’t abide by these basic standards? You’re letting these people freeze to death in this facility right before our very eyes! How can you possibly think you’re going to be admitted to the EU?"
And the man turned to me, and he said, "I’ve been reading stories about Abu Ghraib. Your country ain’t so great." And you know what? He pulled the carpet right out from under me. The United States is not going to stand by international rights principles. Even though we can talk about international law and refer to international standards, our credibility as Americans is seriously undermined in taking a stand on horrible abuses that go on anywhere. We let Abu Ghraib happen. If we let abuses go on in the United States against our citizens, our ability to stand tall, our ability to speak out is truly undermined. We have tremendous potential here in the United States for leadership. We have been an inspiration for the world. What the disability community has done in the United States has truly affected the lives of millions of people. Let us be proud. Let us be part of the international community. Let what we have done in the disability community in the United States be part of that larger community, but we can only do so when we sign on to the same standards as we do in every other part of the world.
One other area where it’s absolutely critically important. Article 25 of the Convention is on international cooperation. The United States is a major international donor in the international development area. And in addition to our direct bilateral work, we’re part of many agencies, including the United Nations itself. The Convention convinced us to use our international technical assistance and our money consistent with the U.N. treaty. Now, as many of you know and a lot of the work that I’ve done with USICD over the past few years has been in an effort to get the United States government to end discriminatory funding of U.S. foreign assistance, to end the use of foreign money for programs that exclude people with disabilities. With the help of Senator Harkin and others, we got some legislation complying USAID to follow the policy. There are still violations going on today. Not only by our bilateral agencies but many of the other multi lateral agencies. The United States is a major, major player in international affairs. One reason we need to ratify this convention is to assure that our own foreign policy and money, through The World Bank, in the report that Allison recently wrote about Argentina, in the sit capital city there, we observed horrendous abuses, people held in cells isolated, naked, for months at a time. Horrible abuses. Well, international donor agencies took that 2,000 bed facility, the same amount of money that it costs to operate the whole mental health system in that city for a year was used instead to rebuild this 2,000 bed psychiatric facility. It’s happening over and over again. Well meaning charity organizations are rebuilding orphanages rather than helping them integrate into society. We can’t let this happen. It’s one important reason why we need ratify the Convention.
So I just wanted to add that international perspective. MDRI is very committed to working with this broad coalition, and both through my hat at MDRI and USICD, we’ll be doing that. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
JEFF ROSEN: Okay. We have one more speaker. Then we’ll take a break. And then we’ll really get into gear. The last speaker has been involved in many different organizations. International organizations. But one that’s really impressive that touches me close to home is the U.N. Convention a year ago, the anniversary a year ago. Several of us went to that. The U.S. weren’t even in the room. But I was very touched by that. One person, really a strong writer. So we must ratify. That really was a call to action for everyone. So I want to thank that person for starting that call, John himself. He was on the national committee for the council. Do you have one or two minutes to make a comment?
(Applause.)
SPEAKER: The question is making the green light stay on. All right. Can you hear me?
Okay. I’ll be extremely brief here. I didn’t know I was going to be speaking, number one, and there’s been so many good comments made that I don’t really want to say the same thing over and over again.
What I will say is that the National Council on Independent Living is extremely committed to working with the disability in this community, in this country, to get the U.N. Convention signed and ratified. As you know, we’re an association made up of centers for independent living and state independent living councils all around the country. We’re going to work real hard with USICD and with RatifyNow, particularly on that community effort, to give local city and county councils a voice. The U.N. Convention on the rights of people with disabilities. NCIL, through USICD, is actively involved with Disabled Peoples International and is helping to put together a worldwide network on independent living with the Europeans and Japanese and Canadians. And we’ll be particularly looking at articles in the Convention that deal with independent living.
So we’re excited about this day. I want you all to know that the National Council on Independent Living, which now does have a standing committee, international committee on independent living, to work on these issues. Ended up by one of the USICD board members and a strong NCIL member, Glen White so we’ll be actively involved in these issues, and thank you, Jeff, for this opportunity, and thank you, Eric, and AU and Marca and everybody, Andy, everybody in support of this thing. Thank you.
(Applause.)
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