UN Enable: Promoting the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
The United Nations (UN) has launched a new web site, UN Enable, focused on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). It is available at http://www.un.org/disabilities/
The convention is intended to ensure that people with disabilities are able to enjoy human rights in the same way as everyone else. Countries that choose to sign, ratify, and then implement the convention will then become obligated to abolish laws that discriminate against disabled people and write laws that protect their rights instead. The convention includes provision for protecting disabled people from torture, loss of liberty, and other abuses; and for ensuring that disabled people have equal access to justice (including court systems), transportation, and public services.
In particular, don’t miss the new UN handbook (3.2 Mb) for parliamentarians on the CRPD. Although targeted at members of country parliaments, it may also be a useful tool for disability advocates who wish to work with or pressure their governments to sign, ratify, and implement the convention. It explains the convention and the process for ratifying it in greath depth. We Can Do posted an announcement about the handbook in a prior post.
In yet another earlier post, We Can Do announced a pair of ratification and implementation toolkits from Disabled People International targeted at advocates. These toolkits explain the convention and the ratification process at a more basic level and advises organizations in ways they can become involved.
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This is interesting, and about time to!!
Casdok
26 October 2007
7th December 2012
United Nations (UN) Enable
Dear Sir/Madam
Subject: Partnership for Empower Partnerships Project for Inclusive Communities
Greetings from Uganda
National Muslim Development Council (NMWDC) stands for the rights of the poor, marginalized, disabled and rural communities in Uganda for whom inclusive partnership is one way to empower them to move from vulnerabilities they face and progress to prosperity.
From your website content, we find that there are a lot of ways, synergies and mutuality that are shared between NMWDC and your esteemed organization. It is on this background that we write to you regarding the subject.
NMWDC believes that People with Disabilities (PWDs) should be a natural and integral part of society, contributing their talents and ideas to family, community, national and international development. However, in most Ugandan rural settings, this is not the case. NMWDC believes that a good strategy for PWDs should not be stand alone, but must be an integral part of greater society development projects. This includes areas of education and functional literacy, health, sustainable development, food security, environment protection, employment and shelter. It is in this broad context that NMWDC proposes to lead this project which aims at stimulating inclusive participation of PWDs and fostering an endogenous community leadership process for greater PWDs recognition.
In reference to this, we came across call for proposals for “the empower partnerships project” (http://www.miusa.org/exchange/currentprogs/empower/index_html) to which we are requesting for partnership as required by the application process. The application requires that a team be formed comprising of one U.S. organization and two non-U.S. collaborating organizations. Whereas we are still in discussions with the Uganda Society for the Deaf; a local organization with good standing here in Uganda, we are asking you to be our US-based partner in this project. Alternatively, you could recommend/connect us to another US-based organization you know to be suitable for this proposal in case you are not in position to be our partners for any sound reason.
Kindly let us hear from you on this request so that we can formalize the partnership in time seeing that the deadline for application is January 7th, 2013.
Looking forward to your positive response
Yours sincerely
Hamida Settenda Mukasa
Executive Founder-NMWDC
NATIONAL MUSLIM WOMEN DEVELOPMENT COUNCIL
8 December 2012