[Congressional Record: June 2, 2004 (Extensions)]
[Page E993-E994]
>>From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
[DOCID:cr02jn04-73]

STATEMENT OF ERIC ROSENTHAL, REPRESENTATIVE OF THE UNITED STATES
INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL ON DISABILITIES (USCID) AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF
MENTAL DISABILITY RIGHTS INTERNATIONAL, ON “INTERNATIONAL DISABILITY
RIGHTS: THE PROPOSED UN CONVENTION”

______

HON. TOM LANTOS

of california

in the house of representatives

Wednesday, June 2, 2004

Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, on March 30th, the Congressional Human
Rights Caucus held a groundbreaking Members’ Briefing entitled,
“International Disability Rights: The Proposed UN Convention.” This
discussion of the global situation of people with disabilities was
intended to help establish disability rights issues as an integral part
of the general human rights discourse. The briefing brought together
the human rights community and the disability rights community, and it
raised awareness in Congress of the need to protect disability rights
under international law to the same extent as other human rights
through a binding UN convention on the rights of people with
disabilities.
Our expert witnesses included Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
Mark P. Lagon; the Permanent Representative of the Republic of Ecuador
to the United Nations, Ambassador Luis Gallegos; the United Nations
Director of the Division for Social Policy and Development in the
Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Johan Scholvinck; the
distinguished former Attorney General of the United States, former
Under-Secretary General of the United Nations and former Governor of
Pennsylvania, the Honorable Dick Thornburgh; the President of the
National Organization on Disability (NOD), Alan A. Reich; Kathy
Martinez, a member of the National Council on Disabilities (NCD); and a
representative of the United States International Council on
Disabilities (USCID) and Executive Director of Mental Disability Rights
International, Eric Rosenthal.
As I had announced earlier, I intend to place the important
statements of our witnesses in the Congressional Record, so that all of
my colleagues may profit from their expertise, and I ask that the
statement of Eric Rosenthal be placed at this point in the
Congressional Record.

The U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus: Members’ Briefing on the
United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
It is a great pleasure to be here for this historic
occasion. I would like to thank Representative Lantos, the
Congressional Human Rights Caucus, and the Disability Rights
Caucus for making this possible.
I’m a member of the board of the U.S. International Council
on Disability (USICD) and executive director of Mental
Disability Rights International (MDRI). I have spent more
than ten years in the field doing international human rights
work for people with disabilities–documenting human rights
abuses and training activists. There has been little
recognition of the vast worldwide pattern of human rights
abuses against people with disabilities that exists in the
world today–either by the U.S. government or the United
Nations. Thus, it is a great step forward to bring these
concerns to public attention today. This hearing provides an
invaluable opportunity to discuss what practical next steps
the U.S. Government can take to bring long over-due attention
to the rights of people with disabilities worldwide.
The most important leadership by a U.S. Agency, to date,
has been the work of the U.S. National Council on Disability
(NCD). Over the last few years, NCD has made an invaluable
contribution to advancing discussion and action on
international disability issues by convening International
Watch, a group of experts and leaders in the U.S. disability
community involved in international activities. In addition,
NCD has brought attention to this issue by commissioning two
important reports. In 2002, NCD commissioned Janet Lord of
the Landmine Survivors Network to write a detailed legal and
policy analysis of the need for a new UN disability rights
convention. I recommend that report as essential background
to today’s discussion about the need for a UN convention.

[[Page E994]]

In 2003, Professor Arlene Kanter and I had the honor of
serving as consultants to NCD as authors of a report, Foreign
Policy and Disability: Legislative Strategies and Civil
Rights Protection to Ensure Inclusion of People with
Disabilities. In this report, released at a U.S. Senate
briefing on September 9th, 2003, NCD cites numerous reports
over the last 10 years identifying the failure of U.S.
foreign assistance programs to respond to the needs of people
with disabilities. Not only have construction projects been
inaccessible to people with disabilities but many programs
have not been accessible to people with physical or mental
disabilities. More broadly, there has not been a concerted
effort to document, challenge, or overcome the vast problem
of human rights abuses to which people with disabilities are
subject worldwide.
NCD has called for the reform of U.S. foreign policy and
foreign assistance to ensure the inclusion of people with
disabilities in U.S. foreign policy, foreign assistance, and
all U.S. government and its activities abroad.
If we stand for the human rights of people with
disabilities, we must stand for it in our own actions as the
U.S. government. We must ensure that U.S. funded assistance
programs don’t discriminate. Indeed, we must ensure that
foreign assistance programs respond to needs and are fully
inclusive of people with disabilities.
We have recently made tremendous progress in Congress. I
would particularly like to acknowledge the work of Senator
Tom Harkin who championed historic new legislation in the
last session of Congress. The new legislation requires any
construction funded by USAID around the world to be
accessible to people with disabilities. It requires all U.S.
programs in Afghanistan and Iraq to be accessible to people
with disabilities, in conformity with USAID’s Policy Paper on
Disability. The most innovative new provision of legislation
makes enforcement of disability rights a precondition for
countries to receive funding under the new Millennium
Challenge Account. By creating financial incentives for
governments to take action on disablity rights, this law
establishes a specialized tool of foreign policy that will
help bring attention and pressure on governments to take
action. In the spirit of the NCD report, it is my hope that
MCA views this as more than a tool to use against
governments. It should be viewed as a mandate to help
governments, and non-governmental disability organizations
around the world, to meet these human rights and disability
rights goals. The NCD report calls on Congress to create a
“Fund for Inclusion,” setting aside funds to support for
the development of non-governmental disability rights
organizations.
Turning now to the question: why a convention? In ten
years, MDRI has documented human rights abuses against people
with mental disabilities in 21 countries on three continents.
I have seen untold human suffering in every country I have
visited. I’ve seen people locked away for their whole lives
in psychiatric hospitals, as well as institutions for people
with developmental or other disabilities. I have seen
children and I’ve seen grown men and women left naked,
covered in their own feces. MDRI recently documented a
situation in Paraguay where two boys were placed in an
institution by family members unable to care for them at home
without any form of governmental support. When the boys were
placed in the institution they probably had some form of
intellectual disability, but they wore clothing, they talked,
they interacted with people around them. For at least four
years, these boys were held naked in isolation with no
clothes, no toilet, no place to sleep other than a mat the
floor of a barren cell. They ate their food off the floor.
According to doctors at the facility, they became psychotic
as a result of the years of isolation and abuse. When we
visited them, they could no longer speak. All they did was
scream, howl, and grunt.
Their lives had been thrown away. The lives of 400 men and
women in that same psychiatric facility have been thrown
away. They live in isolation with little hope of returning to
society. Many are denied basic medical care, much less the
dignity of some privacy or their own clothing. In wealthier
countries, people may be detained in clean institutions with
new clothing. But their isolation from society and their pain
at being denied human contact may be much the same. Does the
international community speak out about these abuses? No. In
almost every country of the world, you can find people
relegated to the bleak, back wards of institutions–or
abandoned on the streets. That same experience has been going
on in many societies throughout the world. And the world has
failed to speak out time and time again.
The U.S. administration has said that the proper way to
deal with this is through domestic legislation, rather than
international human rights legislation. I beg to differ on
this point. As a matter of international law, there is a very
important difference between matters of purely domestic
concern and issues of international human rights. The
international legal framework is built upon the notion of
state sovereignty. Matters of social policy and of
educational policy, are protected by state sovereignty. And a
government may do what it will in that area. But the
international community has come to realize there are certain
principles of government practice that are not just matters
of state sovereignty. When governments deny their citizens
basic human dignity and autonomy, when they subject them to
extremes of suffering, when they segregate them from
society–we call these violations of fundamental human
rights. And when a country sinks so low as to deny the
fundamental rights of its citizen, the world will speak out.
We will hold governments accountable for the most extreme
abuses. That is why we need a convention. It’s not enough to
offer technical assistance on how to improve the law, we must
hold governments accountable for their violations.
Based on my observations as a human rights investigator
over the last ten years–and based on the near void of
activity by established human rights oversight bodies–I
believe that the abuses experienced by people with
disabilities around the world are the greatest international
human rights problem that goes unacknowledged in the world
today.
There are at least 600 million people with disabilities in
the world. How many thousands of people are segregated from
society in closed psychiatric facilities? By the thousands,
children and young adults with disabilities are placed in
orphanages and other institutions. I have met families in
Armenia, Turkey, Russia, and Mexico who were heart-broken
about placing their child in an institution–or who were
afraid that they might have to do so one day if they could no
longer provide care. I have met adults with mental
disabilities living a life of terror that they may be one day
forced into an institution if they cannot keep it together to
fend for themselves. I have met fathers, mothers, brothers,
husbands, wives who wanted to keep a relative at home with
them, but their governments do not provide services that will
allow families to stay together in the community. Heart
breaking as it is, parents are often forced to put their
children in orphanages. These are not orphans. These are
children orphaned by social and medical policy that say
they’re different and shouldn’t have a chance to live as a
part of society at large. Social policies that needlessly
segregate people from society are a form of discrimination.
Legal systems that do not protect against arbitrary detention
permit ongoing violations of human rights.
These are just a few of the abuses that can be addressed by
a disability rights convention. This is why we must commit
ourselves to speaking out. We must make it a priority of our
human rights agenda to end such intolerable abuses against
people with disabilities everywhere.
This Congress has adopted legislation establishing that
human rights will be the core of our foreign policy. We must
ensure that this promise extends to people with disabilities.
When governments strip whole groups of citizens of their
rights because of a disability, when governments put people
away, or when they allow them to die on the streets with no
dignified form of assistance, those are human rights abuses.
Challenging such abuses should becomes the core of our
foreign policy.
In its last session, this Congress made invaluable steps in
the right direction by revising our foreign assistance laws.
Now let us explicitly recognize the concerns of people with
disabilities as part of the pantheon of international human
rights issues. I strongly encourage and appreciate the work
of those members of Congress who have supported resolution
169. I call on all members to do the same.
I would like to leave you with one last thought. Over the
years, I have personally encountered hundreds of children and
adults, old men and old women who have spent most of their
life behind bars. It is amazingly easy to write these people
off as subhuman. As if they are already the walking dead. Yet
I have also seen a glimpse of hope in their eyes. With the
smallest amount of respect for their dignity, people come to
life. The tiniest hint of a possibility that a man or woman
might one day leave the institution can give that person a
reason to go on living. What does it matter that people far
across the waters care about them and their rights? It is a
reason to go on living. Members of Congress, you have a
chance to contribute to their reason for living. You have an
ability to contribute to give them hope. In your careers,
this may be one of the least costly and greatest
opportunities to challenge abuses of hundreds of millions of
people. Please take that action. Please support Resolution
169. And please support the U.N. Disability Rights
Convention.

____________________