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A regional consultation on children's rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in the Middle East and North Africa will be held in Sana'a, Yemen, from 29 - 31st October 2007. The aim of the consultation, which is jointly organised by Save the Children, the Arab Human Rights Foundation and the Yemeni Disability Fund for Care and Rehabilitation, is to look at how the new Convention can be used to promote and strengthen the rights of children with disabilities. Participants will also discuss and comment on a child friendly version of the CRPD. The consultation will contribute to an Implementation Handbook which will be published by Save the Children in December 2008. The three-day meeting will bring together more than seventy children and adults with and without disabilities from the following countries: Yemen, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Sudan, Lebanon and Egypt. The 20 children come from the Yemeni children's parliament and NGOs working on disability rights. Other participants include experts in the field of disability rights and government and NGO representatives. H.E. Mr. Abdel Aziz Abdel Ghani, Chair of the Yemeni Al-Shura Council will also attend. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is the first human rights treaty of the 21st Century which marks a paradigm shift in attitudes and approaches to persons with disabilities. It reaffirms that human rights extend to all people, irrespective of disability or age. The significance of the treaty, therefore, is not in establishing new human rights standards for people with disabilities; rather, it is to ensure their realisation. The treaty introduces new obligations to overcome cultural, legal, economic and physical barriers and introduces measures which ensure that people with disabilities are acknowledged as subjects of rights, entitled to respect on an equal footing with all other people. The UNCRPD was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 2006 and opened for signature on 30 March 2007. At present 118 countries have signed, including Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan and Morocco. This is the highest number of signatories in history to a UN Convention in such a short time span. Some 150-200 million out of two billion children worldwide - or ten per cent of children - live with disabilities. Children with disabilities, the majority of whom live in developing countries, experience widespread violations of their rights, many of which are common to those faced by adults – poverty, social exclusion, lack of accessible environments, violence. However, they also face additional abuses – abandonment as babies, institutionalisation, exclusion from education, lack of birth registration, lack of respect for their evolving capacities, inappropriate child protection systems and so forth. And despite obligations to address the rights of children with disabilities under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, too little progress has been made to date. The Sana’a meeting is one of six regional consultations which will contribute to the Implementation Handbook. The first meeting took place in Dhaka, Bangladesh in June 2007. For more information on the Middle East and North Africa regional consultation, contact: Waleed Mohammed Elbashir Ibrahim Faltas Aisha Saeed Sabah Sabri For daily CRIN updates on the consultation, go here. Information will also be made available in Arabic here. Further information
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