Ms Catherine Naughton:

I am happy to do so. They are great questions. I thank Senator Conway. I would be very interested in Mr. Schefer's viewpoint as to whether any country reviewed by the CRPD committee has seen its education system found to be completely aligned to the convention. I think that is a work in progress in most countries. I do not know that you will find a country that would say it has managed to fully include children with disabilities with adequate support in mainstream classrooms, making sure they have education on an equal basis with other children. Certainly, in European countries and in most other countries, there is a lot of work still to be done to ensure that.

The Zero Project is a kind of annual conference which celebrates good practice. It does not monitor the convention. Rather, it shows snapshots of good practice in different fields. It brings people together to discuss matters, highlights what is going well and stimulates international co-operation. It does not have a formal role in monitoring the convention.

It is true, however, that co-ordination and collaboration are extremely important. At the European level, when we had, for example, the last and the first review of the EU by the CRPD committee, as the EDF we worked together with all our members and with any other organisation that contributed to the review of the EU. We had meetings and discussed priorities. When the review took place in Geneva, we also met with all the people concerned. We tried to work out what the top priorities that affect everyone were. However, you still have, and I think the committee appreciates having, the viewpoints of different sectors and organisations. The committee probably also appreciates it when the organisations can come together and define priorities so it is possible for the committee itself to see what the top issues at stake are.

In addition, at the international level there is the International Disability Alliance, which tries to support the disability movement to engage with the committee in Geneva. When any country is being reviewed, the International Disability Alliance gives advice and support to the disability movement to contact the committee, to present its priorities and to act as a sort of support and clearing house in Geneva, working directly to make sure that in every country the disabled persons organisations, DPOs, can find out who the committee member reviewing in their country is and what the different committee members specialise in. We in the disability movement try to act at the national, regional and international level to do that co-ordination without trying to curtail too much the involvement that could come. For example, when the EU was reviewed, we found that organisations such as those working on corporal punishment of children and very many other issues that we had not really included in our work added a richness to the report given to the committee.

On the number of decision makers, I do not know. It is a really good question. We try to look at it every time for the European Parliament. The number is always extremely small. We always look at the representation between men and women, which is easier to assess, more or less. As the Senator says, many people with disabilities do not declare as such, they do not put it forward and it is not counted very specifically. In the European Parliament at the moment there are a small number of members with disabilities, fewer than ten, that we know of. Some of them are active in the disability intergroup of the Parliament. They immediately come and join the intergroup and work on disability issues. Some of them are less involved in disability issues and are working more on other issues, so it is not always that parliamentarians with disabilities work on the disability agenda straight away. I do not have a number across Europe but I think in the Parliament it is something like five or six. Again, this is something I could come back to the committee on in more detail. We could try to do some research on it if it is of interest to the Senator.