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UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

My Lords, I begin on a note of regret. Had it been possible, the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, would have been with us for this debate. I first met her in 1992 while preparing a speech to move, in another place, the Second Reading of my Civil Rights (Disabled Persons) Bill, out of which the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 was filleted. Indeed, she contributed to that speech. Thus was a joy for me, last Wednesday, to hear her make a parliamentary speech of her own. Like the noble Lord, Lord Low, whom it is good to see here this evening, she powerfully reinforces the representation of severely disabled people in this House. One of the most endearing of all the charms of your Lordships’ House is the near certainty of knowing well ahead of an occasion like this who will be taking part. We operate as a fellowship, in debates opened by one or other of us, of all parties and of none, and I am naturally delighted both that it was my noble, and longstanding, friend Lord Ashley who opened the debate with all his customary skill and commitment, and that he was followed to such good effect by the noble Baroness, Lady Darcy de Knayth. For it was the noble Baroness who on 14 July 2000 opened the first debate here on the case for a UN convention on the rights of disabled people. She urged the Government to back the compelling case by Rehabilitation International—RI—for one, in its Charter for the Third Millennium, as a key strategy for advancing the rights of disabled people worldwide. The noble Baroness explained my involvement, as chairman of the World Planning Group chosen by RI to draft its charter and recalled that I had unveiled it at a service in the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in December 1999, attended supportively by the right honourable Michael Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons, my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine of Lairg, then Lord Chancellor, and the late Sir Edward Heath, representing the Opposition. Also present were members of the World Planning Group, including His Excellency Chief Emeka Anyaoku, then Secretary-General of the Commonwealth; Justin Dart, who chaired the United States President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities; Archbishop Tutu of South Africa; Anatole Ossadchikh, Minister of Social Affairs in the Russian Federation; Professor Stephen Hawking; His Royal Highness Prince Ra’ad bin Zeid of Jordan; Sir Harry Fang of Hong Kong, a former president of RI; Dr Arthur O’Reilly, then RI’s chairman; Shri DK Manavalan of India; and a representative of Deng Pufang, chairman of the China Disabled Persons Federation. Speaking for the Government on 3 May, my noble friend Lady Morgan of Drefelin told the House that at a ceremony held at the UN to mark the opening for signature of the convention, His Royal Highness Prince Ra’ad bin Zeid had paid tribute to my ““pioneering role””—having led the process of drafting RI’s charter—in originating the call for the UN convention he was there to sign for Jordan. While it was kind of my noble friend to relate this to the House, in fact nothing I did could have been done without the unwavering support of my colleagues in the World Planning Group, all of high distinction, and drawn from the north, south, east and west of the world to draft the charter. For they, too, operated as a fellowship, which I was privileged to serve. Moreover, the group itself could not have succeeded without the help and backing of national committees formed by disability organisations in most of RI’s 117 member countries to report their priorities to us, Bert—now Sir Bert—Massie having reported for the UK national committee. Also crucial was the endorsement of our call for a UN convention by heads of Government all around the world; in no country was that endorsement made more strikingly clear than in Britain when RI’s charter was presented to the Prime Minister in Downing Street on 5 July 2000. Responding later to a Parliamentary Question from my right honourable friend, Sir Gerald Kaufman, on the Government’s support for the charter, "““and the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the Charter’s call for a UN Convention on the Rights of Disabled People””," the Prime Minister told the House of Commons: "““I welcomed Rehabilitation International’s Charter for the Third Millennium in July 2000. In doing so, I said that I believed it would form the basis of a global consensus on priorities for at least the next decade. This absolutely remains the Government’s view””.[Official Report, Commons, 25/3/02; col. 618W.]" That stance has been maintained with faultless constancy ever since. In fact, the Government’s support for a convention went further than formal backing at the UN. They made a significant financial contribution to involving representative disabled people in the process of drafting the text ultimately agreed. That text, like RI’s call for the convention, was founded on two straightforward propositions: first, that unjustified discrimination against disabled people is morally indefensible; and secondly, that what is morally indefensible ought no longer to be legally permissible. Yet millions of disabled people, children and adults alike, more especially among the poorest of the world’s poor, still have to live with disabilities that were easily preventable at minimal cost. And why? The answer is clearly stated in UNICEF’s exemplary report The State of the World’s Children, which states: "““When so much could be done for so many and at so little cost, then one central, shameful fact becomes unavoidable: the reason that these problems are not being overcome is not because the task is too large or too difficult or too expensive. It’s that the job is not being given sufficient priority because those most severely affected are almost exclusively the poorest and least politically influential people on earth””." Take the incidence of blindness in the world today. Four out of five blind people live in the third world and four out of five of them are preventably blind—this at a time when the cost of saving people from disability has been falling as dramatically as the incidence of preventable disability in many of the poorest countries has increased. That is but one example of the scale of the problems that the UN convention has to address and RI’s Charter for the Third Millennium provides as good a guide as now exists to the way forward. It is a statement not of generalisations, but of well argued recommendations that include many about the contribution that aid-giving countries can make to helping disabled people in the third world: for example, the recommendation to ensure that international assistance programmes require accessibility for disabled people in all infrastructure projects, including technology and communications, to vouchsafe their full inclusion in the economic and social life of their communities. Yet inevitably the disability organisations in the developed world also want to see progress in rooting out discriminatory practices in their own communities; many of the Parliamentary Questions that I have asked since our signing of the convention have reflected concerns put to me by representative disabled people in the UK. They are anxious to know what progress Ministers have made in analysing the compatibility of the convention with British laws, their plans for ratification and whether we shall sign the Optional Protocol about which I asked a recent Starred Question. They also want to know how widely the Government will consult disabled people and their organisations in implementing the convention, monitoring its impact and promoting its purpose. I am asked in particular whether Ministers will consult the RNIB, the RNID, Leonard Cheshire and CEHR; and I know that my noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton will respond as fully and helpfully as he can to these questions. The endeavours of disability organisations to make Britain the exemplar par excellence of full and rapid implementation of the convention richly deserve to succeed, because it was from here that the long, long trail towards achieving equal rights for disabled people began. It did so in 1978, when Sir Peter Large was appointed to head a government committee of inquiry—of which the noble Lord, Lord Low, was also a member—into unjustified discrimination against disabled people. Its landmark report in 1982 called for legislation to outlaw such discrimination. The Americans with Disabilities Act was but one lineal descendant of that report, followed by legislation here and in many other countries and culminating now in the UN convention. That is why this debate should not end without due acknowledgement of Peter Large’s huge contribution to that outcome. Severely disabled himself, often having to rely on an iron lung to stay alive, he was a towering figure in the world of disability whose passing two years ago was an immense loss to disabled people everywhere. We owe it to them—not least, in UNICEF's words, the poorest and least politically influential people on earth—and to Peter's memory, to brook no delay in implementing the UN convention.