12 June 2024
Day 3 of COSP17 was a great day for the Australian civil society delegation. The morning started with Trevor Carroll, Vice President of the Australian Federation of Disability Organisations, giving an intervention (which is a fancy word for speech!) at the general debate.
Meanwhile, PWDA’s Lisa Ira attended a meeting with Disability:IN – an American organisation that works with multinational corporations to achieve disability inclusion and equality. Disability:IN was very interested in PWDA’s Advancing Women with Disability in the Workplace Project and modern slavery advocacy and hopes to work with us in the future on advancing disability inclusion.
Meanwhile, PWDA’s Giancarlo de Vera, who has a passion for guardianship law reform, attended a side event hosted by Inclusion Canada and Inclusion International, on the impact of new supported decision-making laws in the province (the Canadian version of a state) of New Brunswick. Despite advances on this topic worldwide, it’s clear that implementation issues need to be ironed out.
After lunch it was time to head off to two Australian side events. The first was Disabled Peoples International Korea and Queensland Advocacy for Inclusion’s (QAI) joint side event on upholding the human rights of people with psychosocial disability.
The event was moderated by a former PWDA President, Nicole Lee, and we heard about the ongoing issues of indefinite detention, forced treatment and restrictive practices used against people with psychosocial disability. This is an issue that PWDA cares deeply about, having called for the end to indefinite detention at last year’s COSP!
QAI was also finally able to display their amazing artwork at the event after it was caught up in US customs! Each painting was created by a First Nations person with disability and represents an article of the CRPD.
After this event, Giancarlo and Lisa hurried back to the UNHQ to attend the Australian Government’s side event on Australia’s National Autism Strategy. Clare Gibellini, who is a former PWDA Vice-President, and now Co-Chair of the National Autism Strategy Oversight Council, spoke candidly about the difficulties and the successes of co-designing Australia’s first National Autism Strategy with the Government.
In the afternoon, Lisa gave an intervention at the Roundtable on Persons with Disabilities in Situations of Risk and Humanitarian Emergencies. Lisa talked about ensuring effective safeguarding in disability group homes during pandemics, urging States Parties to urgently co-design a strategy to address this issue. You can read Lisa’s intervention speech here.
After the intervention, it was time to head off and prepare for tomorrow, the final day of formal proceedings for COSP17!
We are looking forward to PWDA’s side event tomorrow on advancing employment inclusion for LGBTQIA+ people with disability!