Message for International Day of Persons with Disabilities from the Ombudsman, Nicole Tirant-Gherardi |03 December 2019

Nichole Tirant-Gherardi

‘Enabling persons with disabilities to participate and lead’

“If we are to ‘leave no one behind’ and keep the promise made in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, today’s commemoration of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD) offers us an opportunity to refocus on the major task ahead.

“This year’s chosen theme calls upon us to take action to promote the participation and leadership of persons with disabilities and enable them to fully play their part in the national effort of achieving the 2030 Development Agenda. Empowering persons with disabilities for inclusive, equitable and sustainable development will guarantee that no one is left behind.

“Disability is a cross-cutting issue specifically referred to in parts of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to education, growth and employment, inequality, accessibility of human settlements, as well as data collection and monitoring. It must be fully assumed as we work towards the goals and our national development agenda.

“One billion people or 15% of the world’s population are classified as persons with disabilities and 80% of them live in developing countries. In Seychelles, data remains sketchy and outdated in respect of people with disabilities. Data submitted by the Ministry of Family Affairs to the review committee of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in February 2018, and drawn from the last 2010 national census, indicated that 2,169 persons or 2.6% per cent of the population had a disability.

“Before that, the status of persons with disabilities in Seychelles was raised in a report published in 2008 by the then chairperson of the National Council for the Disabled. In that report, the author reviewed the national attempts to identify people with disabilities. She cited previous data from a survey undertaken in 1981, during the International Year of the Disabled, which had registered a total of 2,908 persons as disabled. Another survey conducted in 1991 disclosed the total had dropped to 732.

‘The decline in figures leads us to assume that either the preventive measures were effective or a good number of people with disabilities were left out of the survey,’ she stated. The report cited a total of 1,496 persons with disabilities which had emerged from the most recent survey before publication which had been carried out in 1996.

“Seychelles signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on March 30, 2007 and ratified it on October 2, 2009. But ten years later we are still to formally domestic it. We are still to take the steps needed to align the definition of disability with the Convention’s Article 1 and to harmonise the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms with the human rights-based approach to disability. We are still to formally address the lack of a systematic approach to the participation of persons with disabilities and their representative organisations in the formulation and implementation of policies that would transform their rights.  

“We still maintain a guardianship system under the Civil Code which gives limited legal capacity to persons with disabilities. The Criminal Code still allows for persons who may be ‘of unsound mind’ to be detained, while parental rights could be withdrawn from parents deemed to fall into this category. The Town and Country Planning Act is still to guarantee the right of persons with disabilities to access services, goods, information and communication technologies as we continue to build structures that do not cater for the special needs of persons with disabilities.

“So what should we do about taking up our responsibilities?

“The UN already has a strategy for action with a policy and an accountability framework, complete with benchmarks to assess progress and accelerate change on disability inclusion. The policy establishes a vision and commitment for the United Nations system on the inclusion of persons with disabilities. So why not simply adopt that strategy?

“In so doing, we could address leadership by placing leaders with disabilities at the heart of planning and management alongside other champions of disability inclusion to develop the framework based on disability-specific policies or strategies to be run by teams or individuals with knowledge and expertise on including persons with disabilities.

“We could address inclusiveness by closely consulting and actively involving persons with disabilities and their representative organisations in everything we do, but also by ensuring that everyone can gain access to our workspaces, services, conferences and events and buildings and facilities, information and communications, with specific measures, equipment and services to achieve it.

We could give practical guidance at management and at grass roots level to support disability-inclusive programmes and develop joint initiatives to leverage our strengths and accelerate progress. And, of course, we need to evaluate our progress to know how we are doing.

“We can make it happen if only we focus on developing the organisation structure that will help evolve our internal systems in order to attract, recruit, retain and promote persons with disabilities into every aspect of our workforce, both public and private sectors. Building capacity of our ‘abled’ staff will ensure they understand disability inclusion and embrace it. But most of all, our storytelling must change to promote the rights of people with disabilities and raise awareness on disability inclusion so that together we can forge ahead.

“In the final analysis, in the words of UN secretary-general António Guterres: ‘When we secure the rights of people with disabilities, we move closer to achieving the central promise of the 2030 Agenda – to leave no one behind’.”

Nichole Tirant-Gherardi

Ombudsman