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International Disability Rights: The Proposed UN Convention'

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  • International Disability Rights: The Proposed UN Convention'

    [Congressional Record: June 2, 2004 (Extensions)]
    [Page E993-E994]
    >>From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
    [DOCID:cr02jn04-73]

    STATEMENT OF ERIC ROSENTHAL, REPRESENTATIVE OF THE UNITED STATES
    INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL ON DISABILITIES (USCID) AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF
    MENTAL DISABILITY RIGHTS INTERNATIONAL, ON ``INTERNATIONAL DISABILITY
    RIGHTS: THE PROPOSED UN CONVENTION''

    ______


    HON. TOM LANTOS

    of california

    in the house of representatives

    Wednesday, June 2, 2004

    Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, on March 30th, the Congressional Human
    Rights Caucus held a groundbreaking Members' Briefing entitled,
    ``International Disability Rights: The Proposed UN Convention.'' This
    discussion of the global situation of people with disabilities was
    intended to help establish disability rights issues as an integral part
    of the general human rights discourse. The briefing brought together
    the human rights community and the disability rights community, and it
    raised awareness in Congress of the need to protect disability rights
    under international law to the same extent as other human rights
    through a binding UN convention on the rights of people with
    disabilities.
    Our expert witnesses included Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
    Mark P. Lagon; the Permanent Representative of the Republic of Ecuador
    to the United Nations, Ambassador Luis Gallegos; the United Nations
    Director of the Division for Social Policy and Development in the
    Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Johan Scholvinck; the
    distinguished former Attorney General of the United States, former
    Under-Secretary General of the United Nations and former Governor of
    Pennsylvania, the Honorable Dick Thornburgh; the President of the
    National Organization on Disability (NOD), Alan A. Reich; Kathy
    Martinez, a member of the National Council on Disabilities (NCD); and a
    representative of the United States International Council on
    Disabilities (USCID) and Executive Director of Mental Disability Rights
    International, Eric Rosenthal.
    As I had announced earlier, I intend to place the important
    statements of our witnesses in the Congressional Record, so that all of
    my colleagues may profit from their expertise, and I ask that the
    statement of Eric Rosenthal be placed at this point in the
    Congressional Record.

    The U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus: Members' Briefing on the
    United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

    Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
    It is a great pleasure to be here for this historic
    occasion. I would like to thank Representative Lantos, the
    Congressional Human Rights Caucus, and the Disability Rights
    Caucus for making this possible.
    I'm a member of the board of the U.S. International Council
    on Disability (USICD) and executive director of Mental
    Disability Rights International (MDRI). I have spent more
    than ten years in the field doing international human rights
    work for people with disabilities--documenting human rights
    abuses and training activists. There has been little
    recognition of the vast worldwide pattern of human rights
    abuses against people with disabilities that exists in the
    world today--either by the U.S. government or the United
    Nations. Thus, it is a great step forward to bring these
    concerns to public attention today. This hearing provides an
    invaluable opportunity to discuss what practical next steps
    the U.S. Government can take to bring long over-due attention
    to the rights of people with disabilities worldwide.
    The most important leadership by a U.S. Agency, to date,
    has been the work of the U.S. National Council on Disability
    (NCD). Over the last few years, NCD has made an invaluable
    contribution to advancing discussion and action on
    international disability issues by convening International
    Watch, a group of experts and leaders in the U.S. disability
    community involved in international activities. In addition,
    NCD has brought attention to this issue by commissioning two
    important reports. In 2002, NCD commissioned Janet Lord of
    the Landmine Survivors Network to write a detailed legal and
    policy analysis of the need for a new UN disability rights
    convention. I recommend that report as essential background
    to today's discussion about the need for a UN convention.

    [[Page E994]]

    In 2003, Professor Arlene Kanter and I had the honor of
    serving as consultants to NCD as authors of a report, Foreign
    Policy and Disability: Legislative Strategies and Civil
    Rights Protection to Ensure Inclusion of People with
    Disabilities. In this report, released at a U.S. Senate
    briefing on September 9th, 2003, NCD cites numerous reports
    over the last 10 years identifying the failure of U.S.
    foreign assistance programs to respond to the needs of people
    with disabilities. Not only have construction projects been
    inaccessible to people with disabilities but many programs
    have not been accessible to people with physical or mental
    disabilities. More broadly, there has not been a concerted
    effort to document, challenge, or overcome the vast problem
    of human rights abuses to which people with disabilities are
    subject worldwide.
    NCD has called for the reform of U.S. foreign policy and
    foreign assistance to ensure the inclusion of people with
    disabilities in U.S. foreign policy, foreign assistance, and
    all U.S. government and its activities abroad.
    If we stand for the human rights of people with
    disabilities, we must stand for it in our own actions as the
    U.S. government. We must ensure that U.S. funded assistance
    programs don't discriminate. Indeed, we must ensure that
    foreign assistance programs respond to needs and are fully
    inclusive of people with disabilities.
    We have recently made tremendous progress in Congress. I
    would particularly like to acknowledge the work of Senator
    Tom Harkin who championed historic new legislation in the
    last session of Congress. The new legislation requires any
    construction funded by USAID around the world to be
    accessible to people with disabilities. It requires all U.S.
    programs in Afghanistan and Iraq to be accessible to people
    with disabilities, in conformity with USAID's Policy Paper on
    Disability. The most innovative new provision of legislation
    makes enforcement of disability rights a precondition for
    countries to receive funding under the new Millennium
    Challenge Account. By creating financial incentives for
    governments to take action on disablity rights, this law
    establishes a specialized tool of foreign policy that will
    help bring attention and pressure on governments to take
    action. In the spirit of the NCD report, it is my hope that
    MCA views this as more than a tool to use against
    governments. It should be viewed as a mandate to help
    governments, and non-governmental disability organizations
    around the world, to meet these human rights and disability
    rights goals. The NCD report calls on Congress to create a
    ``Fund for Inclusion,'' setting aside funds to support for
    the development of non-governmental disability rights
    organizations.
    Turning now to the question: why a convention? In ten
    years, MDRI has documented human rights abuses against people
    with mental disabilities in 21 countries on three continents.
    I have seen untold human suffering in every country I have
    visited. I've seen people locked away for their whole lives
    in psychiatric hospitals, as well as institutions for people
    with developmental or other disabilities. I have seen
    children and I've seen grown men and women left naked,
    covered in their own feces. MDRI recently documented a
    situation in Paraguay where two boys were placed in an
    institution by family members unable to care for them at home
    without any form of governmental support. When the boys were
    placed in the institution they probably had some form of
    intellectual disability, but they wore clothing, they talked,
    they interacted with people around them. For at least four
    years, these boys were held naked in isolation with no
    clothes, no toilet, no place to sleep other than a mat the
    floor of a barren cell. They ate their food off the floor.
    According to doctors at the facility, they became psychotic
    as a result of the years of isolation and abuse. When we
    visited them, they could no longer speak. All they did was
    scream, howl, and grunt.
    Their lives had been thrown away. The lives of 400 men and
    women in that same psychiatric facility have been thrown
    away. They live in isolation with little hope of returning to
    society. Many are denied basic medical care, much less the
    dignity of some privacy or their own clothing. In wealthier
    countries, people may be detained in clean institutions with
    new clothing. But their isolation from society and their pain
    at being denied human contact may be much the same. Does the
    international community speak out about these abuses? No. In
    almost every country of the world, you can find people
    relegated to the bleak, back wards of institutions--or
    abandoned on the streets. That same experience has been going
    on in many societies throughout the world. And the world has
    failed to speak out time and time again.
    The U.S. administration has said that the proper way to
    deal with this is through domestic legislation, rather than
    international human rights legislation. I beg to differ on
    this point. As a matter of international law, there is a very
    important difference between matters of purely domestic
    concern and issues of international human rights. The
    international legal framework is built upon the notion of
    state sovereignty. Matters of social policy and of
    educational policy, are protected by state sovereignty. And a
    government may do what it will in that area. But the
    international community has come to realize there are certain
    principles of government practice that are not just matters
    of state sovereignty. When governments deny their citizens
    basic human dignity and autonomy, when they subject them to
    extremes of suffering, when they segregate them from
    society--we call these violations of fundamental human
    rights. And when a country sinks so low as to deny the
    fundamental rights of its citizen, the world will speak out.
    We will hold governments accountable for the most extreme
    abuses. That is why we need a convention. It's not enough to
    offer technical assistance on how to improve the law, we must
    hold governments accountable for their violations.
    Based on my observations as a human rights investigator
    over the last ten years--and based on the near void of
    activity by established human rights oversight bodies--I
    believe that the abuses experienced by people with
    disabilities around the world are the greatest international
    human rights problem that goes unacknowledged in the world
    today.
    There are at least 600 million people with disabilities in
    the world. How many thousands of people are segregated from
    society in closed psychiatric facilities? By the thousands,
    children and young adults with disabilities are placed in
    orphanages and other institutions. I have met families in
    Armenia, Turkey, Russia, and Mexico who were heart-broken
    about placing their child in an institution--or who were
    afraid that they might have to do so one day if they could no
    longer provide care. I have met adults with mental
    disabilities living a life of terror that they may be one day
    forced into an institution if they cannot keep it together to
    fend for themselves. I have met fathers, mothers, brothers,
    husbands, wives who wanted to keep a relative at home with
    them, but their governments do not provide services that will
    allow families to stay together in the community. Heart
    breaking as it is, parents are often forced to put their
    children in orphanages. These are not orphans. These are
    children orphaned by social and medical policy that say
    they're different and shouldn't have a chance to live as a
    part of society at large. Social policies that needlessly
    segregate people from society are a form of discrimination.
    Legal systems that do not protect against arbitrary detention
    permit ongoing violations of human rights.
    These are just a few of the abuses that can be addressed by
    a disability rights convention. This is why we must commit
    ourselves to speaking out. We must make it a priority of our
    human rights agenda to end such intolerable abuses against
    people with disabilities everywhere.
    This Congress has adopted legislation establishing that
    human rights will be the core of our foreign policy. We must
    ensure that this promise extends to people with disabilities.
    When governments strip whole groups of citizens of their
    rights because of a disability, when governments put people
    away, or when they allow them to die on the streets with no
    dignified form of assistance, those are human rights abuses.
    Challenging such abuses should becomes the core of our
    foreign policy.
    In its last session, this Congress made invaluable steps in
    the right direction by revising our foreign assistance laws.
    Now let us explicitly recognize the concerns of people with
    disabilities as part of the pantheon of international human
    rights issues. I strongly encourage and appreciate the work
    of those members of Congress who have supported resolution
    169. I call on all members to do the same.
    I would like to leave you with one last thought. Over the
    years, I have personally encountered hundreds of children and
    adults, old men and old women who have spent most of their
    life behind bars. It is amazingly easy to write these people
    off as subhuman. As if they are already the walking dead. Yet
    I have also seen a glimpse of hope in their eyes. With the
    smallest amount of respect for their dignity, people come to
    life. The tiniest hint of a possibility that a man or woman
    might one day leave the institution can give that person a
    reason to go on living. What does it matter that people far
    across the waters care about them and their rights? It is a
    reason to go on living. Members of Congress, you have a
    chance to contribute to their reason for living. You have an
    ability to contribute to give them hope. In your careers,
    this may be one of the least costly and greatest
    opportunities to challenge abuses of hundreds of millions of
    people. Please take that action. Please support Resolution
    169. And please support the U.N. Disability Rights
    Convention.

    ____________________
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