By IDA

 - October 17, 2012

New York, 17 October 2012 – IDA joins the celebration of this day and takes the opportunity to appeal to States, the UN human rights system and other stakeholders to address the discrimination and exclusion faced by persons with disabilities in international development efforts, and to ensure that all actions in this regard are consistent with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

At the Millennium Summit (September 2000), world leaders committed themselves to cutting by half by the year 2015 the number of people living in extreme poverty. Persons with disabilities, of whom 80 per cent live in developing countries, face a greater risk of living in absolute poverty. However, they have been effectively invisible throughout the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and this situation has been compounded by a lack of reliable statistics on people with disabilities.

Although in the last years there has been significant progress in recognizing and proactively addressing the exclusion and discrimination faced by people with disabilities, as evidenced by the MDG Summit outcome document (September 2010), which highlights the need for inclusion of persons with disabilities and the outcome document Rio+20 (2012), which recognizes the participation of persons with disabilities in the development agenda, the reality is that today there is still very little presence of people with disabilities in development policies and programmes.

The new framework to be established for the period post-MDGs beyond 2015 will play a key role in addressing the discrimination and exclusion faced by persons with disabilities in international development efforts. “The High Level Meeting on Disability and Development to be held in 2013 should lead to an increased attention to the rights of persons with disabilities in the post-MDGs international development framework and we will need the support of all to achieve this,” stated Yannis Vardakastanis, IDA´s Chair.

IDA would like to take the opportunity that this Day offers to appeal to States, the UN human rights system and other stakeholders to ensure that the new framework is focused on the poorest and the most marginalised groups, such as people with disabilities and that their rights are mainstreamed across all post-2015 development goals. IDA would also like to highlight the necessity to use data and statistics on disability as a base for global comparison as well as the full and effective participation of representative organisations of people with disabilities in the implementation of the MDGs.

Contact: Vladimir Cuk at vcuk [at] ida-secretariat.org and Orsolya Bartha at obartha [at] ida-secretariat.org
IDA Website: http://www.internationaldisabilityalliance.org/en
IDA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/InternationalDisabilityAllianceIDA
IDA Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/IDA_CRPD_Forum

For more information:

International Day of Extreme Poverty: http://www.un.org/en/events/povertyday/index.shtml
UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Poverty/Pages/SRExtremePovertyIndex.aspx

 

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