Welcome remarks by UNDP Resident Representative Louisa Vinton

At "See, Hear, Take a Step" Conference

to Mark the International Day of Persons with Disabilities

3 December 2019,

Hotel Radisson Blu Iveria

Tbilisi, Georgia

Excellencies, distinguished guests, dear colleagues and friends

On behalf of the United Nations Development Programme, it’s a great pleasure to welcome you all here today to this conference dedicated to the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.

We’re pleased to be marking this occasion in the company of so many friends and allies who, like UNDP and the entire UN system, are committed to dismantling the barriers that prevent persons with disabilities in Georgia from enjoying the equal rights that are their birth-right.

In taking stock of Georgia’s achievements on this front, we salute the significant progress that has been made in recent years.

This includes the ratification of the landmark UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which entered into force in 2014; the passage of a sweeping anti-discrimination law that specifically bans discrimination on the basis of disability; and the adoption in 2018 of a special constitutional article on the Right to Equality, which specifically tasks the state with creating the conditions to make it possible for persons with disabilities to enjoy their rights.

At the same time, now that more than five years have passed since the Convention took force, we need to take a sober and self-critical look at the challenges that remain and the work that still needs to be done to realize the UN Convention’s transformative potential.

As I think you all agree, the Convention is a revolutionary document, and it bears stressing here just what a breath-taking shift it mandates for governments and societies, and what a liberating promise it offers – if implemented as intended – for persons with disabilities.

The Convention does this by discarding the “medical” model of disability, which sees persons with impairments as somehow sick or broken and requiring “fixing,” and replaces it with a “social” model, which says that disability is caused by the way society is organized, by the barriers (both physical and mental, in terms of assumptions and prejudices) that it puts in the way of disabled people.

In this sense, the UN Convention says that it is society, and not any intrinsic impairment, that disables people. And it is thus society, and not the person with a disability, that requires fixing.

We’ve seen that Georgia has adopted much of the legislation that is needed to make these social repairs. But how is the country doing in translating these laws into meaningful improvements in the everyday lives of persons with disabilities?

That is the focus of our discussion today.

By way of introduction, let me note here that one thing that has struck me after a little over a year in Georgia is the degree to which persons with disabilities remain more or less invisible.

Persons with disabilities are part of the diversity of human existence, yet – at least in my experience – on a normal day in Tbilisi you hardly ever see people in wheelchairs or children with Down’s syndrome.

This invisibility is reflected in the data – or rather in the lack of data – on the scope of disability in Georgia. Here around 125,000 persons are registered as disabled, or 3.3 percent of the population. But this probably undercounts the actual number by a huge margin, since in most countries the figure generally hovers around 12 percent.

So where are all these people?

To me, the likely answer is that stigma and prejudice are conspiring to keep persons with disabilities hidden and isolated, prevented from attending school, taking employment, accessing public services or leading a normal life, among friends and family, in the community.

This impression has been validated recently in reports by the Public Defender and by Maggie Nicholson, the independent expert UNDP tasked with assessing Georgia’s progress on human rights since 2014.

As you saw in the video that opened the conference, it is also the perception shared by persons with disabilities, who played a direct role in setting our conference agenda, in line with the motto of the disability-rights movement: “nothing about us without us.”

In fact, it was our friends from the organizations and associations representing persons with disabilities who defined today’s theme:   

SEE the challenges we are facing every day;

HEAR our concerns and understand our needs; and

TAKE A STEP to resolve the problems at all levels.

They also helped us identify three key issues for discussion today:

• First, public policy on disability, where there is unfinished business in the outstanding ratification of the Optional Protocol to the Convention and the designation of a focal point in Government to coordinate all activities related to disability;
• Second, artificial intelligence and robotics as potentially transformative technologies for persons with disabilities; and
• Third, accessibility of facilities and services, where the physical and psychological challenges are evident for all to see.

UNDP is proud to be involved in efforts to improve the situation in all of these areas, and in many more, with kind support from the European Union and the Swedish, British, Danish and Norwegian governments.

And I’m very pleased to announce here that UNDP, along with five of its sister UN agencies, has secured new funding of USD 2 million for a new joint UN program aimed at improving the social protection of persons with disabilities, which will launch in January 2020.

Dear ladies and gentlemen

At 12 percent of the global population, the disability community is often referred to as the world’s largest minority. And many of us will find that, with the wear and tear that aging brings, we are also becoming members of that community.

So when talk about the promise of the Sustainable Development Goals “to leave no one behind,” we have persons with disabilities foremost in our minds, not just on this International Day, but each and every day.

Thank you all for joining us in this effort.