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UK 'must ratify' disability pact

BBC: Tuesday, 6 January 2009

The UK's equality body - the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) - has criticised the government's delay in signing the UN disability treaty.  And the EHRC has written to the government asking it to explain the large number of proposed opt-outs.

The official name of the disability pact is: The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It ame into force in May last year.

So far, the Convention has been signed by 139 countries and ratified by 50 of them.

Ratification means that a country accepts its legal obligations under the convention and enacts any necessary legislation.

The United States of America did not sign the Convention. UK , France, Canada did but has not yet ratified it.

Some countries who have both signed and ratified the Convention: Hungary, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Tunisia,  Spain...

The UN convention sets out the rights of an estimated 650m disabled people.

An estimated 80 per cent of these persons live in developing countries, many in conditions of poverty. In both developed and developing countries, evidence suggests that persons with disabilities are disproportionately represented among the world’s poor and tend to be poorer than their counterparts without disabilities. It is estimated that of the world’s poorest people, meaning those who live on less than one dollar a day and who lack access to basic necessities such as food, clean water, clothing and shelter, 1 in 5 is a person with disabilities.

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Jacques Dufresne's
Blog

The editor of L'Encyclopédie de L'Agora and well known newspaper chronicler and philosopher, analyses actuality through the looking glass of Belonging.
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