A Review of the United Nations Disabilities Convention Website

"'What the Convention endeavours to do,' said Don MacKay, Chairman of the committee that negotiated the treaty, 'is to elaborate in detail the rights of persons with disabilities and set out a code of implementation'."

This website, which is a sub-site of the United Nations main home page, is involved in publicizing the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. The convention, which started in August 2002, produced a definitive text in August 2006 that discussed various disability issues including "accessibility, personal mobility, health, education, employment, habilitation and rehabilitation, participation in political life, and equality and non-discrimination." It is, according to the website's Frequently Asked Questions page, "[marking] a shift in thinking about disability from a social welfare concern, to a human rights issue, which acknowledges that societal barriers and prejudices are themselves disabling."

The site also includes resources such as news about the convention and the text it produced, press releases about the convention, media resources, and links to other pertinent sites.

The website provides a link to he text of the convention itself, which includes a preamble and fifty distinct articles that each adress a different aspect of disability rights or the legality of the document itself. The articles range from everything between articles twenty-four and twenty-five, which, respectively, address education and health issues, to article ten, which talks about the right to life, to article nineteen, which focuses on living independently and being included in the community.

The website also has a list of facts about the world's disabled population with figures not unlike those from the United States Census. For example, it lists that about ten percent of the world is disabled; this is only about half of the disabled percentage of the United States. It also mentions that eighty percent of the world's disabled population lives in developing countries. These statistics also focus on numbers that include other topics that affect disabled people, i.e. disability and education, disability and violence, and disability and employment. It shows that the education offered to disabled people is far below what is offered to non-disabled people, that the unemployment rate for disabled people is excessively high, and that people with disabilities have an increased risk of being targeted by violence.

Overall, the UN Convention on Disability Rights webpage is very informative, easy to navigate, and is designed, as their page on accessibility says, to be as accessible as possible to those with disabilities.