Back On Track

On July 24, President Barack Obama announced that the United States will sign the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities. To become international law binding on the United States, the Senate will have to ratify this convention. This will take time and outcome is uncertain. But Obama's first step is an event of enormous significance for at least three reasons.

First, previous administrations - both Republican and Democrat - have largely removed the U.S. from participating in international human rights law. So, for example, the U.S. and Somalia are the only two countries that have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This isolates us and makes the U.S. less influential in the global human rights dialogue.

Obama's decision to sign the disability convention, which 140 countries have already signed and 59 have ratified, is a move toward restoring our place in the international community. The convention protects the estimated 650 million people with disabilities worldwide (the world's largest minority group). In many ways, the significant involvement of people with disabilities makes this a unique human rights treaty. Typically in U.N. negotiations, nongovernmental actors sit in a separate area from the delegations that are doing the negotiating. But at the U.N., this separate area was inaccessible to people with mobility impairments. So an exception was made and groups of people with disabilities were allowed into the main area of the negotiating room, where they interacted closely with the delegates. This resulted in a sense of investment in the process - people with disabilities adopted the mantra "nothing about us without us," - and led to this being the fastest negotiated human rights treaty in U.N. history.

I just returned from Vietnam, where I was working with that government on its own disability laws. There, advocates had used the U.N. convention as a tool to get their own governments to become more involved and active in protecting disability rights. They looked to the U.S., and its strong disability laws, as a source of guidance and inspiration. To be sure, USAID has provided large sums of money for law development in Vietnam and other countries. But our credibility, and standing as a world leader on these issues, has been diminished by our lack of participation in the disability convention.

Especially with our strong disability laws, which provided a blueprint for much of the convention, the U.S. should be part of this treaty. That is why it is fitting that Obama made this announcement on the 19th anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA has created a more accessible society in the United States, changing attitudes and combating stigma and stereotypes along the way. With his announcement, Obama correctly recognized that the rights of people with disabilities are not just civil rights to be enforced at home, but part of the larger cause of human rights that is advancing worldwide. We should be an active part of this effort.

Second, Obama's action puts to rest the Bush administration position that human rights treaties are unnecessary in the U.S. because our laws are stronger. Regarding the disability convention, this position is simply wrong. I co-authored a report for the National Council on Disability (an independent executive agency that gives advice to the president and Congress on disability issues) that looked at how U.S. laws overlapped with the requirements of the convention. Although we found that U.S. law is generally on the level of the convention, we found some gaps. For example, U.S. laws prohibit employers from discriminating against people with disabilities when they apply for and work in jobs. But this does not address many of the barriers keeping people with disabilities out of the workforce: a lack of job-training programs, the threat that they will lose their health insurance if they work, and a lack of reliable and accessible transportation to get them to their jobs. For these and other reasons, the employment rate of people with disabilities has not gone up in the past 20 years. The disability convention, in contrast, takes a broader approach, encouraging a wide range of assistive programs and services to put and keep people with disabilities in the workforce.

Third, ratification will be a useful exercise for the U.S. The process is an opportunity for policymakers and stakeholders to evaluate U.S. laws and examine how they might be improved and strengthened. In our report, we found that many gaps between U.S. law and the U.N. convention could be closed through more rigorous implementation of existing law. To be sure, there may ultimately be requirements or ideas in the convention that would not work in this country. There will no doubt be times in the ratification process when various parties use these as a rationale that the U.S. not ratify this treaty. This would be the wrong approach. While we should not hesitate to make reforms and consider alternative approaches, there is a structure within international law to accommodate these concerns. Where appropriate, the U.S. could attach reservations to our ratification.

Obama's action is the first part of this process, but an important one. It helps reclaim our credibility in international human rights, and could help improve the lives of people with disabilities in this country.