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Summary: During the Middle East and North Africa regional consultation on children and the UN disability Convention in Sana’a, Yemen, CRIN will be talking to some of the children, with and without disabilities, who are participating. Their voices will be recorded here: http://www.crin.org/DisabilityNews.
Waheeb, 17, is from Taiz, Yemen. He is in Sana'a with the Organisation for Democracy and the Yemeni Children’s Parliament. Have you talked before to your government about the rights of children with disabilities in your work with the children's parliament? Does the government pay attention to what the children’s parliament tells them?! What are some of the challenges you think children with disabilities face here in Yemen? What about in other areas of children’s lives? In some schools, when we ask the teacher to repeat something, they say they will not repeat it, because we are disabled so it won’t make any difference – we still won’t understand. The Minister of Education of Yemen has written some articles about the rights of children with disabilities, but school head teachers do not accept the. Why do you think this is? Do you have some recommendations you would like to give to your school or government about actions they can take to fight discrimination against children with disabilities? Do you think this new Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities you have been discussing here today will push the government to change things for children with disabilities? I will tell the other children in my organisation about the Convention and I will give copies to schools. I hope that the officials involved in the event will meet our expectations and implement our recommendations. But, in my work with the children’s parliament, I, and the others involved, meet the government every three months to make recommendations, but they are never implemented. In Yemen we have a lot of laws, we have some of the best laws in the world; the problem is, they are never implemented! This is my experience.      Â
No, we negotiate with the government on many issues: violence in schools and prisons, psychological torture, street violence, etc and we ask them to adopt laws, but this is the first time I have been to a conference on the rights of children with disabilities.
They have only listened to one thing: to stop violence against children in schools. Children can no longer be beaten in schools in Yemen.
People always think children with disabilities are beggars, for example, if someone with a disability goes into a restaurant, the other people automatically think they are there to beg.
Many families neglect children with disabilities. They think they are useless. They ask ‘what can you do? Nothing!’
It is partly because they do not know about rights and partly because they don’t want to change things.
Yes, I want the government to build ramps in parks so that we can play too because we can’t play with other children in the playgrounds – they are not built for us. They should also build ramps in public places such as restaurants so that we can go in. I think the media should also talk constantly about children with disabilities, for example, they could make TV serials which include people with disabilities.