From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Disability rights leaders from the European Union and the United States met at the University of Pittsburgh last week to discuss a United Nations treaty and exchange information about disability access, information technology and transportation.

The UN’s disability rights convention has been signed by 139 countries and ratified by 57. The United States has neither signed nor ratified the treaty.

Marca Bristo, president of the U.S. International Council on Disabilities, took the nation to task for its lack of action on the treaty.

“The UN convention is an incredible opportunity to change the world, but many people in the U.S. don’t know what it is. We need to catch up,” she said, noting that President Barack Obama supports ratification.

“We have an important role to play. We have a lot to learn and a lot to give.”

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s new book Staring: How We Look explores the “constructive possibilities” of a forbidden activity, writes Peter Monaghan in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only).

People with disabilities, argues Garland-Thomson (left), a professor of women’s studies at Emory University, are not merely the objects of other people’s gazes, but also take some control of the experience of being stared at. To the extent that they do that, they change the experience for the starer, who may come away from it with greater understanding.

Garland-Thomson, who writes about disability issues from the perspective of a person with a disfigured arm, says the UN’s passage of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities signals a weakening of the societal view that disabilities are primarily medical matters.

For those living with disabilities, that statement reflects a “new way of understanding ourselves, as a community, and a minority group,” says Garland-Thomson. “And that emphasis on civil or human rights gives us a new confidence, and positive disability identity, and pride, if you will, that wasn’t available before the civil-rights era.”

Book excerpt here.

Earlier posts here and here.

(Photo from Emory University website)

Report: People with disabilities four times more likely to be crime victims

From the [UK] Guardian:

Urgent action is needed if a “hidden catastrophe” of violence and hostility towards disabled people is to be tackled, says a damning report today from the [UK] Equalities and Human Rights Commission.

The report paints a bleak picture of disabled people’s experience of physical and verbal abuse and reinforces persistent warnings from disability campaigners that the problem has not been taken seriously enough.

… “Violence and hostility can be a daily experience … so much so that many disabled people begin to accept it as a part of everyday life,” the report says. “Disabled people – including those who have not experienced such behaviors directly – are all too often forced to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it, thereby limiting their own lives.

Among the report’s conclusions:

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From the Toronto [Ontario] Star, Global News Canada:

The parents of Annie Farlow, an infant who died at an Toronto hospital in 2005, are pressing a claim before the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal alleging that their daughter received inadequate care because the hospital withholds life-saving treatment from infants with disabilities.

Barbara and Tim Farlow say their daughter, who was born with Trisomy 13, was admitted to Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children with breathing problems but did not receive proper care because a “do not resuscitate” order was issued without their knowledge or consent.

The Farlows’ concerns are similar to those raised by the Wallace family last week, who alleged that staff members at the same hospital suggested that they stop feeding their daughter Kaylee and let her starve because she has a rare brain disorder. Jason Wallace said he was told that the hospital had to consider how much money Kaylee’s care might cost.

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Last-minute settlements were inexcusably weak, they say

From National Public Radio:

In the waning days of the Bush administration, the Justice Department announced settlements in six cases involving the civil rights and physical safety of people in mental hospitals, institutions and nursing homes.

Disability rights organizations are now challenging those settlements. They say the hurried agreements fail to protect the civil rights of people living in institutions, and don’t require states to assure that institutions meet even basic standards of care.

Their suspicion: that states hurried to reach agreements with the Bush administration because they feared more robust enforcement efforts by the Obama administration.

“They all involve situations where people are dying,” [says Ira Burnim, legal director at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington, D.C.] “In the cases of a couple of nursing homes, people are being denied adequate food and hydration. There are problems with food and restraint. They’re all very serious issues. And in none of the settlements can you tell what is going to happen over the next month, the next six months, the next 12 months to improve the situation.”

From the New York Times:

Canadian Peter Ash, a businessman and former Baptist minister who is diagnosed with albinism, has launched a charity devoted to defending albinos in Tanzania. More than 40 people have been murdered there for their body parts since 2007.

In the last two years, rumors have spread in East Africa that potions made with albino blood, shoes made of albino skin, tendrils of albino hair woven into fishing nets and amulets with albino body parts will make people rich.

The charity, “Under the Same Sun,” aims to protect the estimated 17,000 people with albinism in Tanzania by appealing to the United Nations, pressuring the Tanzania government to take action, asking for guarded camps, and supporting a march against the killings.

See earlier post here.

(New York Times photo)

From the [Canadian] National Post:

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has been signed by 50 nations. Although Canada signed almost two years ago, it has yet to ratify the accord.

Advocates say Canada continues to lag behind in providing full inclusion for people with disabilities, and that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has failed to deliver on his campaign promise of a Canadians with Disabilities Act.

“We have had human rights legislation in various forms in Canada for many years now. Ensuring those rights, especially for those with intellectual disabilities, has been overlooked and neglected,” says Catherine Frazee, a professor at Ryerson University’s school of disability studies in Toronto and former chief commissioner for the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

See also:

Struggle For A Voice — [Canadian] National Post

The Canadian Association for Community Living (CACL) works to ensure basic human rights for the estimated 700,000 Canadians who have an intellectual disability. While progress has been made, officials say their work is still an uphill struggle.

“There is still tremendous disparity across Canada,” says CACL president Bendina Miller. “Access to education, employment, accommodation and basic support services depends largely on where you live.

“… We want national recognition that an intellectual disability does not make you a second-or third-class person. Yet despite being a society that embraces diversity, we still have a paradoxical approach to those with intellectual disabilities.”