[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 75 (Wednesday, June 2, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E993-E994]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   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.

                          ____________________