United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
Australia ratified the Convention on 17 July 2008, making us one of the first Western countries to do so. By ratifying the Convention, Australia has joined other countries around the world in a global effort to promote the equal and active participation of all people with disability.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol were adopted at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on 13 December 2006, and entered into force internationally on 3 May 2008.
Extract from the UN Website:
The purpose of the Convention is to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all people with disability, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity.
Article 30 – Participation in cultural life, recreation, leisure and sport
“What the Convention endeavours to do,” said Don MacKay, Chairman of the committee that negotiated the treaty, “is to elaborate in detail the rights of persons with disabilities and set out a code of implementation”.
1.To recognize the right of persons with disabilities to take part on an equal basis with others in cultural life, and shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that persons with disabilities:
- Enjoy access to cultural materials in accessible formats;
- Enjoy access to television programmes, films, theatre and other cultural activities, in accessible formats;
- Enjoy access to places for cultural performances or services, such as theatres, museums, cinemas, libraries and tourism services, and, as far as possible, enjoy access to monuments and sites of national cultural importance.
2. To take appropriate measures to enable persons with disabilities to have the opportunity to develop and utilize their creative, artistic and intellectual potential, not only for their own benefit, but also for the enrichment of society.
3. To take all appropriate steps, in accordance with international law, to ensure that laws protecting intellectual property rights do not constitute an unreasonable or discriminatory barrier to access by persons with disabilities to cultural materials.
4. Persons with disabilities shall be entitled, on an equal basis with others, to recognition and support of their specific cultural and linguistic identity, including sign languages and deaf culture.
5. With a view to enabling persons with disabilities to participate on an equal basis with others in recreational, leisure and sporting activities, the appropriate measures shall be taken:
- To encourage and promote the participation, to the fullest extent possible, of persons with disabilities in mainstream sporting activities at all levels;
- To ensure that persons with disabilities have an opportunity to organize, develop and participate in disability-specific sporting and recreational activities and, to this end, encourage the provision, on an equal basis with others, of appropriate instruction, training and resources;
- To ensure that persons with disabilities have access to sporting, recreational and tourism venues;
- To ensure that children with disabilities have equal access with other children to participation in play, recreation and leisure and sporting activities, including those activities in the school system;
- To ensure that persons with disabilities have access to services from those involved in the organization of recreational, tourism, leisure and sporting activities.
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