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The Fight to Ratify the U.N. Disability Rights Treaty: Can the U.S. Both Teach and Learn?
By Pam VanderVeer | June 17, 2008
The Leadership Conference for Civil Rights, the USA’s largest coalition of civil rights organizations, carried this article about RatifyNow on their website:
Feature Story from civilrights.org
Adina Appelbaum
June 12, 2008
A RatifyNow panel in Washington D.C. on June 3 addressed the need for the United States to ratify an international treaty on disability rights.
RatifyNow is an international nonprofit organization that supports grassroots efforts to ratify and implement the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), a United Nations treaty that took effect on May 3 for participating countries. The U.S. has not yet ratified the treaty.
Don MacKay, chairman of the U.N. committee that negotiated the treaty, said the treaty’s goal is to "elaborate in detail the rights of persons with disabilities and set out a code of implementation."
Many of the speakers at the panel said that it is uncharacteristic of the U.S. to refuse to ratify the treaty since it is the first ever international human rights treaty to protect people with disabilities and is partially inspired by the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. In fact, Prof. Michael Stein, executive director of the Harvard Project on Disability, said that the treaty "squares nicely with U.S. law."
The event marked the launch of RatifyNow’s campaign to urge Congress to ratify the treaty. More than two-thirds of U.N. member nations have already signed or ratified the treaty.. "[G]iven our history and values, you would assume the natural role for the U.S. to be a leading one, not passive," said Richard Thornburgh, former U.S. Attorney General and U.N. Under-Secretary-General.
The speakers said that U.S. ratification of the CRPD would help advance the rights of Americans with disabilities as Congress envisioned when it passed the ADA. Disability rights advocates are currently working to get Congress to reauthorize the ADA, the spirit of which has been eroded by several Supreme Court decisions since its passage.
According to RatifyNow, the treaty will help one-quarter of the world’s population, 650 million people with disabilities and their families.
Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, spoke of the significance of disability rights as civil rights, saying that its failure to ratify the treaty should "embarrass the U.S. to do better."
Pointing out that this year is the 60th anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Henderson said that there is no better time to "reassert core principles that the U.S. has already embraced."
Perhaps the most striking question raised at the event was whether the U.S. is too proud to learn from other countries. "We need to be a country that can both teach and learn," said Judy Heumann, director of the D.C. Department on Disability Services and former advisor to the World Bank on disability issues.
There is no deadline for the U.S. to ratify the treaty.
Topics: RatifyNow News |
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