DPAC: Is the United Nations Committee on Rights of Persons with Disabilities investigating the UK?

  Posted: 19 Jul 2014 10:21 AM PDT

This video on youtube seems to suggest that it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR_sLy_8B-8
(watch from 1hr and 4 minutes in)

This video is taken from a proceedings of a recent conference on the UNCRPD in Galway in June this year.

The conference session is entitled:

Monitoring the CRPD — the Work of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

And the person speaking is Gabor Gombos Adjunct Professor at NALSAR Law University, India and at NUI Galway.

We have isolated the relevant clip of the video and posted it below:-

http://dpac.uk.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/New-Project4.webm

Here is a transcript of the video:

"The primary mandate of the treaty bodies is this country review, which is mandated by the treaty itself. Now under several treaties including the CRPD, there are optional protocols which give additional mandates to the treaty body. In the case of the optional protocol to the CRPD one of the additional mandates is inquiry procedure."

"The inquiry procedure is basically about grave and systemic violations of human rights in the country. Where the issue has been raised and the government did not really make effective actions to fix the situation, it is a very high threshold thing; the violations should really be grave and very systemic."

"And it cannot be based on gossip. An inquiry procedure against a country has a

very, very high profile internationally also, it should be established and the procedure is highly confidential until the outcome, the end of the procedure."

"The committee has not completed an inquiry procedure yet, but the committee

started its first inquiry procedure against the United Kingdom, I wanted to share

this with you, this is a public piece of information. Nothing else about the inquiry procedure is public, okay?"

 "So we only know that the United Kingdom has the privilege to be made accountable through an inquiry procedure by the CRPD committee regarding grave and systemic violations of persons with disabilities in the United   Kingdom. We'll see,

 I'm really curious what will happen and what this inquiry procedure is about."

"Again civil society does play an enormous role in this. Typically an inquiry procedure is initiated by civil society organisations; it's a highly confidential procedure as I told you and it's a very dynamic procedure, the treaty body can delegate some of its members to visit the country and meet NGOs, meet governments and enters into a dialogue with them."

So it seems there is a quiet investigation into the violations by the UK government of the rights of disabled people. As said in the video, the inquiry procedure is not triggered by gossip but by very serious human rights violations corroborated by facts and statistics.

If true, this is what disabled people have been waiting for a very long time: a genuine, thorough and independent investigation of the retrogression of disabled people’s rights and of what they had to suffer for the past 4 years.

We sincerely hope that it is true.