Ms Frances Quan Farrant:

I am honoured to be given the opportunity to speak with members. I bring greetings from Australia, which is located on unceded First Nations land. Where I live is the home of the Kabi Kabi peoples of Southeast Queensland. My Irish ancestors from Kilkenny, Cork, Tyrone and Dublin would be immensely proud to know that their descendant, one of the diaspora of the Famine, has been honoured with this opportunity. I pay my respects to members, my ancestors and the people on whose land I reside upon with gratitude. I apologise for my inability to address you in Gaelic, but my forbears were forbidden to speak their native tongue, so I have no cultural memory in order to do so. I am sorry.

From the very inception of the convention as a concept in Mexico in the late 1990s, DPOs have been intrinsic to the development and implementation of the convention. It was disability rights activists and their representative organisations that revealed the abuses and horrors that Mexican disabled people were facing in locked institutions. It was Mexican DPOs that took this information directly to their then Government and their then President, Ernesto Zedillo, who instigated a global push to develop a UN convention on the rights of disabled people. Using their embassies and consulates across the world, Mexico was able to bring together enough support to have the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities commended to the United Nations. I wish to add that it was one of the fastest UN conventions ever developed.

Key players in this work with Mexico were Australia and New Zealand. Australia’s leading DPOs, namely, People with Disability Australia and the First Peoples Disability Network, conducted extensive field research to identify exactly what disabled people wanted in their convention. Australia was the only country to go directly to disabled people and consult. We asked the questions and got the answers. We collated the data and then, with the support of our consulates, we helped to directly develop the articles of the convention. It must be noted that eminent Irish legal scholar and current, though outgoing, UN rapporteur on disability, Professor Gerard Quinn, was directly involved in the development of the UNCRPD.

More broadly, DPOs play a role in ensuring the UNCRPD is implemented in nation states. As civil society organisations, DPOs are fundamental in ensuring transparency of process and in holding governments to account in maintaining the rights of disabled people.

The path is not always smooth and, at this time in world history, it could be said that we are seeing an erosion of the very principles of human rights. This is where DPOs have a special role to play. DPOs maintain the pressure and remind governments that disabled people are also citizens and, as citizens, are rights-holders. It is the work of DPOs that has revealed the atrocities acted upon disabled people in Ukraine. DPOs have a role as truth-tellers. It is DPOs that speak directly to government to change the systems and structures that perpetrate ableism and thus create institutionalised barriers that limit and oppress disabled people. To quote Gerard Quinn at the Conference of the States Parties, COSP, 15 in New York in 2022, the very logic of the UNCRPD is to dismantle ableism. It is DPOs that ensure this process of dismantling ableism is ongoing because - I nod to our own Australian disability discrimination commissioner, Dr. Ben Gauntlett - disability policy is good policy for all people.

We must look to the future not just with hope and perseverance but with an entrepreneurial lens to harness opportunities for lasting changes and to ensure that systems and structures do not maintain the status quobut are remodelled to uphold the rights of all citizens, because disabled people are citizens of their clans, of their countries and of the world.