Mr. Markus Schefer:

On the impact of not ratifying or ratifying the optional protocol, I would say it has a legal and political impact and a symbolic impact. The legal and political impact is you add the Judiciary to the players promoting rights of persons with disabilities. If you ratify the optional protocol, the Judiciary will have to take the CRPD and the rights in the CRPD seriously and apply them. You do that if you incorporate it.

If you can have recourse to the Judiciary against an Administration that is not quite willing to implement the laws that Parliament has passed to the degree necessary, an active Judiciary will have an impact on the Administration and that then will transform, hopefully, into better implementation of the laws by the Administration. It adds the regular parts of government that we usually rely on in order to implement the laws. If you do not ratify the optional protocol, you will leave out the Judiciary and, as in all areas of law, if you leave out the Judiciary something is lacking and implementation will suffer.

Then there is a symbolic consequence.

Not ratifying the optional protocol tells the world community you are not comfortable enough with what you are doing to have an external body in a court-like procedure examine whether your internal actions, as they transform to individuals, are in conformity with the CRPD. It creates the impression among the rest of the world that you are not confident enough that you are doing enough or whether you are implementing what you are doing to the degree that suffices under the CRPD. The optional protocol and the convention together are one whole. That is why the committee continuously urges and recommends member states to ratify the optional protocol. I am the special rapporteur on new communications on the committee so I deal with all the individual communications as they come in as well as with, for example, the interim measures that have become more important. It is important that, even from the international level, we give people who think their rights have been violated under the convention a recourse outside of their country that gives them the assurance that the person looking at their case is not entangled within the confines of the political system of a specific country. The optional protocol can assure that.