MDAC announces project on effective monitoring of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
The Mental Disability Advocacy Centre (MDAC) today announces a yearlong project that seeks to provide direction to governments and civil society on the effective implementation of Article 33 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Article 33 deals with domestic implementation of the Convention. Practical guidelines and checklists will be developed that will assist governments and NGOs in understanding the obligations of States Parties under Article 33. The project will also apply these guidelines in order to determine whether State Parties to the Convention are meeting their obligations under Article 33. A summary report will be submitted to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to assist the Committee in holding States Parties to account.
The UNCRPD is one of only two international human rights treaties to contain a specific provision on the role and structure of domestic implementation and monitoring mechanisms of the Convention (Article 33). (The only other similar provision is the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture). The outcomes of this project will be hugely useful to civil society groups, policy makers and researchers here in Ireland. It will also be very useful in benchmarking the implementation of the Convention here.
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That will be most useful to the Americans, who won’t sign it and frustrated it’s negotiation, and who with some Arab states, at the negotiations, became knows, due to their collective efforts, as the “Axis of the Medieval”.
To be serious, the IHRC with other national institutions, were very central to drafting and pushing for inclusion wording on national enforcement. Gerard Quinn, in particular, was very influential at the negotiations, as was William Binchy who gets little praise in his work in this area.
The Convention also contains language indicating that any national institution charged with monitoring should be Paris Principle compliant, though the informal indications are that the National Disability Authority are to be the orginisation and they are very far from compliant with those principles.
The Centre for Disability Law and Policy here at NUI Galway is also involved on a EU project on challenges and good practices in implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. The Report is being finalised and should be publicly available in the coming months and that will be a great resource for all State Parties also. It will be interesting to see these outputs and what they state in relation to monitoring of the Convention.