Disability Rights Lost in the Shadows…

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (see link, below) was supposed to represent a massive paradigm shift not only in how we conceptualise disability but also, where people who are living the experience of disability are located in any progress made toward real equality. Supposedly gone were the days when people living with disability were nothing more than the passive recipients of other people’s brilliant or barbaric ideas and practices. People living with disability become, as they should, rights bearers, active agents in determining their own dreams, hopes, and aspirations. Well, that at least, was how it should have been…

With the deepest sorrow, I have observed how the CRPD compliance process in Australia has been totally corrupted by the gaggle of government-funded disability, community legal and other services that have taken sole possession of creating the Shadow Report. Their first and foremost duty is not to upset the government that keeps them afloat, and so, contrary to the principles of the CRPD, they have cooked-up a scheme that substantially diminishes the voices of people who are actually living with disability. The emphasis, conversely, is on government-funded service talking with government-funded service, to produce a compliance report that will be short on hard evidence and big on aspirational ideals.

That, I guess, is the Australian way. Even the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), the government body that promotes itself as a defender of disability rights, operates in practice to frustrate or shut down people living with disability who have genuine complaints about discrimination, harassment, vilification, abuse, and torture. We suffer under the extraordinary situation where any law in Australia, no matter how far it diverges from accepted human rights standards, is immune from any challenge, so long as it was properly enacted. Human rights protections, therefore, for people living with disability in this country, can be effectively wiped off the map by the simple passing of an Act.

What disappoints me most is that while all these games are being played ‘inside the tent’, outside in the real world massive human rights abuses are being perpetrated against people living with disability. I know of many such people in Australia who have been tortured or abused in public mental health facilities, government-funded residential services, and through glaring omissions and denials of care. The voices of these people will not be heard nor noted in the Shadow Report that is to be presented to the United Nations later this year. Their stories are too unpalatable, too damning, and too descriptive of the abject lack of human rights protections for people living with disability in Australia…

 Monitoring the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2010