In a report published on Wednesday 24 April, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) called out the UK Government for their callous treatment of disabled people.
The report ruled that:
The Committee finds that the State party has failed to take all appropriate measures to address grave and systematic violations of the human rights of persons with disabilities and has failed to eliminate the root causes of inequality and discrimination
The report follows up from the inquiry in March where the government absolutely showed itself up by trying to make it sound like it cared about disabled people – and the UN special rapporteurs consequently dragged them over the coals.
Findings from the UNCRPD report
The UNCRPD report pulls the government up on many things – including benefits deaths, Work Capability Assessment (WCA) reforms, the institutionalisation of disabled people, and British Sign Language (BSL).
Truly, it’s an absolutely damning report – but it is 15 pages long, the first 10 of which are just reporting what the government lied about.
For it to get really juicy we skip to page 11 where the committee tells the government they are still “concerned about the insufficient national consistency” to meet the obligations of the convention.
The report reiterates Kayess’ statement to the committee back in March that stated:
There is a pervasive framework and rhetoric that devalues disabled people and undermines their human dignity. Reforms within social welfare benefits are premised on a notion that disabled people are undeserving and wilfully avoiding employment (“skiving off”) and defrauding the system. This has resulted in hate speech and hostility towards disabled people.
The report goes into further detail by telling the UK government it has made “no significant progress” to ensure disabled people can live independently. This includes insufficient amounts of benefits, not enough funding for care, and lack of accessible transport.
Appalled by WCA, benefits deaths, and snooping
Onto work, and the UNCRPD committee called the WCA “complex and onerous” – noting that it fails to take into account specific circumstances. The committee also raised concerns about the WCA reforms that had been expressed by Deaf and Disabled Peoples’ Organisations (DDPOs).
The committee dragged the government’s plans to snoop on disabled people’s bank accounts – saying the use of AI would bring with it inherent biases; machines only know what they’re taught at the end of the day. They also expressed concern that disabled refugees were being left without support
The UNCRPD also expressed that they were “appalled” by the scale of benefits deaths, saying
the evidence received revealed a disturbingly consistent theme: disabled people resorting to suicide following the denial of an adequate standard of living and social protection, starkly contradicting the foundational principles enshrined in the Convention.
The government dodged questions about the scale of benefits deaths during the inquiry, which was especially galling to sit through.
Recommendations
The committee said they found the recommendations that they issued when the government was hauled before them in 2016 had not been fulfilled. This was, as people may remember, when the UNCRPD accused the government of “grave” and “systematic” violations of disabled people’s human rights.
The report has many recommendations. These include taking benefits deaths seriously, amending hate crime laws to include us and that benefits actually well, benefit us.
It called on the government to create a consistent framework to implement and monitor the convention in the UK. The report doesn’t say this, but for that to truly happen and be something that the government and society has to follow, it’s the view of DDPOs and activists that the convention must become national law.
In the UNCRPD report’s own words
The Committee concludes that no significant progress has been made in the State party concerning the situation of persons with disabilities addressed in the inquiry proceedings.
Since the UNCRPD inquiry, the government seems to have doubled its efforts to make disabled people the enemy. That culminated in Rishi Sunak announcing huge proposed reforms on benefits. Truly the only way this can get better is if we get these fuckers out and to hold the next lot to account.
Time for a general election now.
Featured image via the Canary
