By Christian Papesch and - -
NEW YORK, Oct 27 2011 (IPS)

In a move that highlighted its sub-par human rights record, the government of Burma announced Oct. 11 that it would release 6,359 prisoners, but how many of these will be drawn from the country’s estimated 500 to over 2,000 political prisoners remains uncertain.

Elaine Pearson of Human Rights Watch, Jeanne Marie Hallacy, director of "Into the Current", and Thet Moo, former Burmese political prisoner Credit: Christian Papesch/IPS

Among them was comedian and activist Zarganar, who was arrested in June 2008 for speaking to foreign media about the precarious situation of millions of Burmese left homeless in the Irrawaddy delta following a devastating cyclone. Five months later, Zarganar had been sentenced to 59 years in prison for public order offences.

Even though international activists and organisations such as New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) generally appreciated the initial wave of releases, they remain critical about the actual reach of the announcement.

“It is a positive step in terms of those individuals and their families, but in terms of bigger amnesties they should really release all prisoners unconditionally,” Elaine Pearson, deputy director of HRW’s Asia division, told IPS.

“It is really quite a small step forward. These people are not bargaining chips or hostages for the military to play with. They’re people who have been unjustly imprisoned.”

“Into the Current“, a documentary by Bangkok-based American filmmaker Jeanne Marie Hallacy, portrays some of those prisoners and gives an overview of the political and social situation in Burma, a country that was under military rule from 1962 to 2011.

“The most challenging aspect of the film was that we knew that we had to rely upon memory,” the director said in an interview with IPS.

“It was really challenging for us to find a way that we could be provocative and evoke the kind of deep emotion and passion that people experienced in prison without having visual evidence of what they actually experienced,” she explained.

But this lack of visual imagery also lends itself to the oppressive and alarming atmosphere of “Into the Current”. By relying on statements made by former prisoners, the political terror of an oppressing regime acquires a face, a voice and a destiny.

One of the thousands of prisoners who endured the cruelty of Burma’s jails is Thet Moo, imprisoned for seven years for being a member of the All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU), which helped organise the 1988 pro-democracy national uprising that was violently suppressed by the military junta.

In prison, “we don’t know our future,” Moo told IPS. “I don’t know if I can get out alive or not.”

Not only are mental and physical punishment the order of the day for the majority of prisoners, but filmmakers like Hallacy along with journalists supporting her work in Burma also face serious daily threats.

“Working inside the country is extremely difficult for journalists and media,” the director, who has not been granted a Burmese visa since the late 1990s, said.

“We have seen Burmese journalists who have been sentenced for 65 years for one story. And we have gotten corroborated information that they have been tortured in order to have them spill out other information about their colleagues in this underground network of media who gather information.”

For this reason, a lot of the material used in the film is old footage shot by Hallacy during the 1990s, secretly filmed recordings or personal statements and objects – portraits of families, letters to friends or a song sung by a prisoner himself.

“People respond to stories of individual human beings – people who are fathers or mothers or have sisters or brothers who are in prison,” Hallacy said.

“They’re numbed by numbers,” she elaborated. “If you cite a statistic, it’s meaningless to most people. But if you try to bring into focus a few of these heroes and heroines and their acts of courage it speaks on behalf of the whole.”

The broader image that “Into the Current” draws of Burma is a negative one, but the film’s message is not completely pessimistic. At the end, protagonist Bo Kyi, a former political prisoner who is currently in exile in Thailand, finally gets to see his wife and little daughter again.

Even though their family cannot yet lead a normal life in Burma, hope for a better Burma does exist, especially after last year’s election of a new government.

“The problem of the new government is that their bureaucracy is very slow,” Thet Moo explained. “We are waiting for them to change. If they are changing, everybody would want to return to Burma.”

For Pearson, the second largest country in Southeast Asia still has a very long way to go. “Burma has one of the most desperate human rights situations in the world,” she said. “We haven’t seen the new government really putting in the effort to effect change in the country.”

The great white hope of Burma – and one of the characters to which the film repeatedly refers – is Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese opposition politician and 1991 winner of the Nobel Peace Price “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights”.

“The message of the film was to convey that non-violence is their path,” Hallacy pointed out.

“That’s what will prevail change – not vengeance, not hatred, not retribution but actual inclusion and responding to cruelty with kindness, because that’s what changes people. When you change people’s hearts, you change people’s politics.”

Aung San Suu Kyi has never been in jail, but she has been under house arrest for 15 of the last 21 years. This is one of the reasons why the politician has become a symbol of opposition against oppression for many Burmese, especially those who still remain in prison for their resistance against the governing system.

“We saw the release of 200 political prisoners, there is still another 1800 that remain in prison,” Pearson concluded. “These are people who have criticised the government, written controversial articles in the media, participated in demonstrations. They are not people who should be in prison. They are people who should be part of the community.”

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By Christian Papesch
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 21 2011 (IPS)

The Islamic Republic of Iran has one of the most desperate human rights situations in the world.

Elise Auerbach, Iran country specialist for Amnesty International USA Credit: Colin Trenbeath/Single Arrow Productions

On Tuesday, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which monitors states’ compliance with their obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, met to consider the current circumstances in Iran.

But Amnesty International warned that Iranian authorities would “make a farce” out of the hearing unless they acknowledged their current and past abuses, such as imposing the death penalty on juvenile offenders; discriminating against and arresting religious and ethnic minorities and homosexuals; and carrying out unfair trials and torture.

IPS correspondent Christian Papesch talked to Elise Auerbach, Iran country specialist for Amnesty International USA, on human rights in Iran, the international community’s response, political complications and the potential impact of the “Arab Spring” in Iran.

Q: The report Iran submitted this week to the U.N. Human Rights Committee was more than a decade late and yet still failed to reflect serious and continuing abuses. Was it a farce? A: I wouldn’t call it a farce. They have not addressed concerns of the international community. The United Nations Secretary-General now issues reports twice a year on Iran. The Special Rapporteur Ahmed Shaheed just issued a report but he was not allowed into the country. They brought up a lot of the concerns that we have about Iran’s human rights record.

But Iran does not address these concerns. They claim that accusations against its human rights records (are) motivated by politics, that the United States and other Western countries are orchestrating this smear campaign against Iran for political reasons.

I would say that the report is inadequate and extremely evasive. It’s just an attempt to avoid having to address in any kind of serious way the concerns of the international community.

Q: In the past month we have seen a number of revolutions and uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. Do you think the “Arab Spring” could reach Iran? Will there be an uprising against the human rights violations of the government? A: There were some very serious protests in Iran in the summer of 2009. Millions of people poured into the streets to protest what they saw as falsified election results. Many people would say that these protests were the forerunners of the protests in Arab countries this spring.

The Iranian government brutally suppressed the protests in the summer of 2009. There were some protests in December 2009 and there have been some sporadic mass protests since then, but not on a level that has been seen in Arabic countries this year.

But certainly the Iranians have taken enormous risks to protest what they see as unfair government. The Iranian government is doing the very best it can to try and prevent and avoid any further massive protest.

Q: Two days ago, filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s appeal against his sentence of six years in prison and a 20-year ban on filmmaking and travel was rejected. Is there any way for him and other critics of the regime to continue working in Iran? What steps has Amnesty International taken to support activists like Panahi? A: Jafar Panahi has expressed his desire to remain in Iran money times. He says he loves his country and doesn’t want to leave Iran – and yet he has been prosecuted.

We collected about 21,000 signatures on a petition on behalf of Jafar Panahi. Some very well known Hollywood celebrities like Sean Penn, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese signed it. We did a petition delivery to the Iran mission to the United Nations in New York. We went into the building of the Iran mission and after some negotiation finally an official agreed to take the petition.

There is broad crackdown against artistic impression in Iran and it is very difficult for people to operate in Iran. But no matter how difficult it is for them to exercise their right of freedom of expression, they still do it. Iranian people are extraordinarily courageous – they always think of ways to outwit the Iranian government.

Q: What are the main difficulties Amnesty International faces in its attempts to improve the human rights situation in Iran? How does the country differ from other countries on which you work? A: Iran is certainly one of the most challenging countries to work on. For one thing, it’s challenging because of its scale of human rights violations. There are just so many problems in Iran and the system is not at all transparent. Amnesty International is not allowed access into Iran.

Fortunately there is a very large number of human rights activists in Iran that report on human rights violations. We get very good information from them, but the fact that we are not allowed in the country to do our mission is a problem.

We want to make clear that our agenda is not the agenda of the U.S. government. When we are criticising Iran’s human rights record we are speaking as human rights activists and that’s our only concern.

We have to be very careful with our messaging because of the fact that the debate over Iran can be very politicised with other issues, such as Iran’s nuclear programme, its supposed hostility towards the state of Israel, supposed influence on other Middle Eastern countries.

There are just a lot of other very fraught issues involved with Iran so it’s kind of like a minefield and we have to be very careful to just adhere to our human rights message.

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It was a political sensation: 8.9 percent of the 1.53 million Berliners who participated in the city-state parliamentary elections on Sep. 18 (overall turnout was 60 percent) voted for the Pirate Party (Piratenpartei).

The Pirate Party has connected strongly with young voters. Credit: Cornelius Bartke/Piratenpartei Berlin

The first constitutive session in the Berlin House of Representatives will not take place until Oct. 27, but excitement has remained high over the new political force among other parties, political scientists and the media.

“The punch line to a joke, or an exciting new form of online democracy?” asked the New York Times two days after the Pirates’ electoral upset, while Spiegel Online, one of Germany’s leading news websites, characterised them as “The New Rebels.”

Angela Merkel, German chancellor and head of the governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU), said in an interview with the national social network StudiVZ, “The existence of the Pirate Party is a reason for us to especially consider questions concerning the internet and also consequently questions about the copyright and basic rights.”

Dr. Gero Neugebauer, a professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin, told IPS, “If they become a representative of a relevant conflict, for example concerning the relationship between politics and the Internet… and find sufficient social support in this field, their influence will grow.”

But what is the agenda of the Pirate Party? Can they influence the political scene either in or outside of Germany? And what’s driving their popularity?

Youth appeal

The party and its youthful candidates are using language that especially young voters understand and can identify with.

“We are young and fresh,” Ben de Biel, spokesperson for the Berlin Pirate Party, told IPS.

The Pirates identified and tapped into “a disenchantment of the voters with the established political parties, because they primarily talk about themselves or the people, but not with them,” de Biel said.

“The voters are hardly able to understand decisions of political parties because of missing or non-transparent information given by the established parties.”

This is one explanation. The political climate in the German capital is another.

“The rapid social change and upheaval in Berlin during the last 10 years has created enclaves of Pirates supporters that do not exist in comparable size in other cities,” Neugebauer said.

“The lifestyle in these communities is influenced by a libertarian ideology on one side and often by precarious circumstances on the other, which is why a strong identification between these structures and their political representatives exists,” he said.

Pirate Agenda

Like its Swedish model, the Piratpartiet founded in 2006, and more than 30 Pirate Parties in other countries, the main goals of the Piratenpartei are guaranteeing freedom of information and privacy rights, the reform of copyright and patent laws, and government transparency.

In contrast to its earlier years, the Piratenpartei no longer focuses as heavily on internet and technology issues.

“Political strategies for the internet, software and so on are useful tools which can and will advance social developments,” De Biel said. “But they are not living, eating or other things. That is why we did not campaign as a technology-savvy party, but clearly expressed that we [are familiar with other issues] and offer technical solutions to them.”

But while the Party’s objectives are broad, they boil down to two main themes: government transparency and citizen empowerment.

To practice what they preach, the Piratenpartei publishes its account balance on its website. As of May 26, the party’s assets were 213,116 euro and 51 cents.

Impact in Berlin and Germany

The objectives of the Piratenpartei appear both admirable and ambitious. But can the party have a real influence on Berlin politics? And what significance does their electoral effect have for Germany and the rest of the world?

“Every party in a state parliament in general has the opportunity to impact politics, even though the chances for the opposition are worse than those of the parties in power,” Neugebauer said. “The pirates attracted the attention of the media and communicated the impression of efficiency. How realistic this is remains to be seen.”

The electoral success of Berlin’s Pirates and the associated media coverage have clearly broadened the party’s popularity in Germany. According to an online poll by the opinion research institute Emnid, commissioned by the conservative German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, seven percent of voters would cast their ballots for the Piratenpartei.

This impacts not just the Party itself, but also the established coalitions.

The coalition between the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Green Party (die Grünen), which was ranked as promising for the nationwide elections in 2013, no longer has a majority; the Liberal party, which constitutes the government together with the Christian-Democrats (CDU/CSU), would not even enter the parliament.

New coalitions, maybe with the left-wing party die Linke or even the Pirates, could become necessary.

“Long-term predictions cannot be made as long as the Pirates do not pass their practical test in other federal states and the Bundestag elections of 2013,” Neugebauer said.

What is clear is that the focus on internet-related issues and the young and modern appearance of the Pirates will continue to have an influence – directly, by gaining seats in state or national parliaments, and indirectly, by pushing other parties to address themes like internet regulations, copyright issues and government transparency.

By Christian Papesch
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 27 2011 (IPS)

About 80 percent of Qatar’s population is foreign. Of the 1.6 million people living in the Arab emirate in 2010, 685,000 were Indian or Pakistani, 160,000 were Iranian and about 430,000 came from other parts of the world.

Dr. Khalid Bin Mohamed Al-Attiyah Credit: Christian Papesch/IPS

From Dec. 11 to 13, the United Nations Alliance of Civilisations (UNAOC) will hold its fourth annual forum in Doha, Qatar’s capital. The goal of the organisation, founded in 2005 in the aftermath of 9/11, is to improve cooperative relations among nations and peoples across cultures and religions, as well as to foster understanding between the Muslim world and the West.

IPS correspondent Christian Papesch talked to Khalid Bin Mohamed al-Attiyah, Qatar’s minister of state for foreign affairs, about his ideas and expectations concerning the forum in Doha, the success and future plans of the UNAOC, and the possibility that Qatar could become a model for international understanding.

Q: 80 percent of Qatar’s inhabitants are not Qatari. What effect does this have on your country? And what can other countries – and the Alliance of Civilisations – learn from your example?

A: We have a mosaic of people from all over the world; each one of them gives us a flavour. Asians give us a flavour. If you go to the Middle East, they give you a different flavour. If you go to the Europeans, they give you a different flavour. The way that the people live in Qatar gives you the best example of how the Alliance of Civilisations is alive in Qatar. What we are doing is what we believe in.

Q: The previous forums were held in Madrid, Istanbul and Rio de Janeiro. What does it mean for Qatar to host the forum now and how will it differ from the others?

A: We are trying to do something other than (what) our colleagues have started. We are trying to come (up) with a new idea, to enhance more and more. I cannot say anything about the previous (countries) because they did their best. But we are trying to translate what they have done… into a tangible project so the stakeholders can feel it, rather than just gathering and exchanging ideas. This is why you will see a lot of action and a lot of brainstorming in Qatar. I can’t tell you the difference because we all complete each other. But I am sure it will be unique and a lot of effort has been done on it.

Q: Who will participate in the forum? Are there any world political leaders who confirmed their participation?

A: Mainly it will be NGOs; NGOs are our friends… There (also) are leaders who are interested in the Alliance of Civilisations. There are main players like the Turks and the Spanish who have to be there because they are the founders, and there are a lot of European leaders who would like to come and join us. And we have not only invited them but we also offered them to moderate and lead round tables of their thoughts. In Rio de Janeiro I said, “We will invite 15,000 people.” And we have received so many replies from leaders we have invited – and some even called to ask why we did not invite them yet.

Q: Will this conference help a lot of other countries to understand Qatar better?

A: Whatever we do, in all directions, we try to be an active player in the globe. We have good cause, we believe in it – and this is why we are reaching out to everyone. Qatar is a rich country; we could close it and just… watch what is going on around us, doing nothing but enjoying the wealth. But this is not our principle. Our principle is to reach out to everyone and to bridge any difference between our brother and friend countries.

Q: Since 9/11 there seems to be a growing Islamophobia and a bad perception of North Africa and the Middle East in European countries and the United States. Is this one of the main issues of the intercultural dialogue and the alliance?

A: We didn’t put it this way. We do not want it to be ‘East’ and ‘West’ – there is nothing as such. Terrorism has no religion. It does not have to be Christian or Muslim or Tamil. We don’t want that the Alliance of Civilisations enhances the idea of East and West. We are trying to encourage living together, all the civilisations. I am not arguing how it started, but that’s how in Qatar we look at it.

Q: About a week ago, 12 UNAOC fellowship holders from Middle Eastern and North African countries visited New York. Do you think addressing youth is important to create better understanding between cultures?

A: For sure. This is one of our main elements; the youth is one of our main pillars in our forum. It is the second year now that we invite a group of youth. And they very soon will be in Doha. And I remember the last year they… visited us from all (over) Europe and the United States – and the guys wanted to take them to the malls and the movies and I said, “We have malls everywhere all over the world. Take them to the real Qatar.” So we took them… camel racing and falconing. They don’t want anything else. This is what we tried to show them. Who we are and where we came from. And we will have a festival only for the youth during the forum, too.

Q: The AOC is six years old now. Do you see any success and progress? Does it have an effect on the relations between cultures that you can feel, count or describe? And are there any plans of action to be implemented over the next few years?

A: The outcomes are always valuable. The time you take (for) your flight and (to) go to this AOC gathering, as soon as you land in any country of the world you benefit immediately, before even doing anything. The only thing we did not manage to find was a mechanism to implement and follow up. This is the core and this is what we lack a little bit. In the future we want to do a lot of things, but mainly we are trying to link the MDGs [Millennium Development Goals] with the AOC goals. If we bridge one of these gaps together, this is a success for us.

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“If this was a meeting about climate change, I am pretty sure that the room would have been more crowded,” Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), commented at a press conference Tuesday.

Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, addresses the high-level summit. Credit: Christian Papesch/IPS

“I think that we need to change the lenses we use to face the issue of desertification,” he added.

Every minute, 23 hectares of productive land is lost through land degradation, in turn causing the loss of 20 million tonnes of grain every year.

Gathered in New York for the 66th U.N. General Assembly, more than 100 heads of state and government participated in Tuesday’s high- level meeting to spur actions to reverse desertification, develop better policies for sustainable land management and to establish a global scientific panel.

“The world’s drylands are too often an investment desert, seen by governments and the international community as a lost cause,” said U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in his remarks at the opening plenary of the meeting in the General Assembly Hall. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

The key to protect drylands from desertification, land degradation and drought lies in maintaining soil health by using Sustainable Land Management (SLM). This technique can be compared to a vaccination for land by managing it without damaging ecological processes or reducing biological diversity.

Since its founding in 1996, the UNCCD has racked up significant successes in land protection and recovery worldwide, accumulation of scientific knowledge about the drivers of land degradation, and education of the leaders and inhabitants of affected countries.

“For instance, farmer-managed natural regeneration and agroforestry techniques – through planting of fertiliser trees on farmlands and grazing lands – have already been adopted in many regions and have contributed to improving over six million hectares across Africa,” said Gnacadja.

In Namibia, one of the driest countries in the world, more than 60 percent of the population depends directly or indirectly on agriculture.

“The threat of land degradation in Namibia is enormous,” said President Hifikepunye Pohamba.

For this reason, the protection of productive land is an official part of the country’s constitution. Article 95, for example, requires the state to protect its ecosystems, while article 92 empowers the state to investigate complains concerning the overuse of natural and non-renewal resources and the destruction of ecosystems.

“Namibia has been one of the countries that has been successful in putting in place frameworks to scale up investment towards sustainable lawn management, early warning and resistance building,” Luc Gnacadja explains. “And you can see the results, compared to other countries that are not yet able to maintain the issue in the national platform.”

The increasing frequency, length and intensity of drought are threatening nearly 1.1 billion people worldwide. More than 2.3 billion people live in arid, semi-arid or dry sub-humid areas – so- called drylands – with a high risk of land degradation.

“Desertification is one of the most complex challenges of our time,” said Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, president of the 66th Session of the General Assembly, in his remarks to the high-level meeting. “It has serious environmental, economic, political and social impacts that affect people, most of whom are poor.”

Notably in countries like Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, the loss of farmland due to desertification is enormous.

“Nowhere is this challenge more critical and the need for action more pressing than in the Horn of Africa,” said Rajiv Shah, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). “The worst drought in 60 years has placed more than 13.3 million people in need of emergency assistance.”

To address desertification in the long term, U.S. President Barack Obama recently launched the global food security initiative Feed the Future. It helps countries to develop their own agricultural sectors to control and reverse desertification.

“By fighting drought and famine in the Horn of Africa today, we fight the despair that can lead people toward violence and terrorism,” Shah said. “When we help a nation feed itself through good times and bad, we break the cycle of food riots, famine and food aid that creates instability throughout regions.”

Even though desertification and land erosion affects the whole world, it is relatively low on the global policy agenda. One of the goals of the UNCCD’s high-level meeting is to change that and to make countries aware of the danger for populations and economies.

“Land is life and our life depends on land,” said Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser. “We must stop the deadly process of desertification, restore health and vitality to our precious earth and protect the livelihoods of people worldwide. This is our responsibility.”

By Christian Papesch
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 9 2011 (IPS)

More than one billion people worldwide live with disabilities, some 15 percent of the world’s population.

Ronald McCallum Credit: Christian Papesch/IPS

On Friday, the Fourth Session of the Conference of the States Parties to the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) wrapped up a three-day session at U.N. headquarters in New York.

Under the overall theme “Enabling Development, Realizing the Rights of Persons with Disabilities” over 500 delegates of government ministries, U.N. system organisations, academic institutions and non- governmental organisations participated in the discussions.

Ronald McCallum is the chair of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities CRPD and a professor of labour law at the University of Sydney.

IPS correspondent Christian Papesch talked to him about the challenges of people with disabilities, the situation in developing countries – and about his personal experiences as the first fully blind person to be appointed to a full professorship in any faculty at any Australian university.

Q: One of the main topics considered at the conference was the employment challenges faced by people with disabilities. Why is employment so important?

A: I don’t think I would have received the same respect in Australia, if I wasn’t working. When you speak with somebody, within 10 minutes the question is: What do you do? Because what we do defines us.

The most important thing that people with disabilities want: We want work. We’d like to support ourselves and if we have families we’d like to support our families. We don’t want to live on social welfare. If you look at the costs of disability welfare, they are enormous. Billions of Euros are spend on disability patients.

Some of my sisters and brothers can’t work because of their disabilities. But it would be better for society if we would have more progress and encourage more of us to work.

Q: Eighty percent of the persons with disabilities live in developing countries. How is their situation and how is your cooperation with the governments?

A: When you are dealing with developed countries, you ask questions like: Are you increasing your level of employment or what are you doing about people with mental disabilities in your guardianship laws? That’s the level that you get.

The conversations you get with developing countries are: Do you have a law preventing discrimination against disabled children? Are women with disabilities allowed to marry? You get down to this basic level.

I was sitting with a boy; he was about 19 years old and lost both his legs when he picked up a cluster bomb in Afghanistan. So I said what is it like in Afghanistan? And he said: ‘Look, in your country, I go in a building and there is an elevator. In Kabul, there are no working elevators. I am stuck on the ground floor everywhere.’

But I want to say that countries like Kenya are improving. I think that we had a big effect on Latin America. So there are countries that are doing it correctly.

Q: Do women with disabilities face specific problems? And what are the actions of your committee regarding this issue?

A: Whenever we dialogue with a country we ask them what’s happening about women. Sadly, the educational levels of women with disabilities are lower than the educational levels of men. And the figures on women with disabilities being subject to violence, or sexual violence, are quite high. Many women with mental disabilities often fall victims to sexual assault, often because the perpetrators know that it will be difficult for them in court to give evidence against them.

There is also the issue of sterilisation of women with disabilities. Sometimes parents of teenage women want that done. Rights of women to have children and to have care of their children are a very big issue.

Q: The Convention of the Rights of People with Disabilities came into force in May 2008. What are you proud of – and what are your future goals?

A: The first thing I am proud of is that we have had so many countries ratifying, because 103 is very good in just over three years. The fastest convention to be ratified was the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but the second largest is the CRPD.

The second thing I am proud of are the states parties themselves. They have elected to the committee 15 of the 18 persons with disabilities. It’s a big theme to ask countries to put up people with disabilities to sit in a committee. In the future, we are trying to write to comments on the convention, the first is on legal capacity and guardianship and the second, which is maybe five or six years away, dealing with access to buildings and transport.

We are also campaigning for more countries to ratify the convention and for an increase on our meeting time.

Q: You are a very successful man and you career might be seen as a guideline for others. How did your disability affect your law studies? Did you experience scepticism or discrimination?

A: I would have loved to become a lawyer who would appear in court. But I couldn’t read documents, so that would have been very hard. So I decided to become an academic, at least I would have read the material beforehand.

What happened in the mid-1980s was computers, so they put a synthetic voice on the computer and I could read what was on the screen. This gave me huge liberation. But I think it was not until I married and got children that people saw me in the centre of society. Before that I was just seen as a very unusual academic who lived on the edges on society, who was different.

But leaving aside wife and children, the most important thing I have done is teach law. I teach students for a year – and I think at the end of this year they never quite think of people with disabilities the same way again.

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