New Zealand Rehabilitation Association, Inc.

New Zealand signed the Convention last year, and has now almost completed all of the work to ensure it is able to ratify it, there are many people, me included, who devoutly hope this happens very soon. There’s something of a sprint for us to get to what might seem to be the finish line, and a certain level of focus on parliamentary process. To some it’s all a bit ho hum; just another bit of abstract paperwork. But the CRPD is really highly significant. Why?

First, it does actually proclaim in an international setting that yes, this group of over 700 million human beings do have human rights that deserve protection. For years disabled people have advocated for such recognition, as there is worldwide evidence^[2] of widespread discrimination and rights abuse, so the recognition is welcome.

Second the way it was written was groundbreaking. Disabled people and their organizations and governments said “nothing about us without us” and ensured that they sat down with governments to write the text of the convention together. It’s the first time a convention has been developed with such involvement of the people it covers.

Third, because it was written with such adequate involvement of disabled people, it was completed in record time. There were 8 meetings between August 2002 and August 2006 at which the Convention was written, and that text was adopted by the general assembly in December 2006. It was written and adopted without lengthy periods of consultation and consideration.   

New Zealand took a leading role in the writing, with disabled people as an integral part of all of the official delegations, and a New Zealand diplomat, Don Mackay, chairing the committee that completed its writing task on a hot August night in 2006. Arising from this history, disabled people in NZ tend to have a strongly protective feeling towards the CRPD.

Fourth, it’s going to mean a better deal for those disabled people with whom rehabilitation professionals have such a lot of interaction, and that is an opportunity for all of us to develop improved ways of interacting. A good prospect surely.

But still, we are not sure we are ‘there’ yet: more effort is needed to get us to one of the major milestones. To make it real, the Convention needs to be monitored, so that the discrimination disabled people experience gets more systematically addressed. If New Zealand is to keep up with its leading role, it needs to ratify soon. That way NZ can take part in a large end-of-year conference that will choose the initial monitoring/ implementation committee.

So if disabled people seem somewhat distracted, we are probably thinking of new ways to urge speed upon our elected representatives, so that we can all get closer to ‘there’.