Mike Lee (R-Utah) was at the forefront of a contingency of 38 U.S. Senators who voted against ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities this week. The international treaty failed to get the required two-thirds majority needed to pass.
Reasons why 38 U.S. Senators, all Republicans, united to ensure the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) failed to achieve the necessary two-thirds majority required to ratify international treaties were plentiful in the wake of Tuesday’s vote. None of them, however, seemed to speak to the interests of the individuals who would be most impacted if it had been passed.
There was the typical attempt to put words into the mouths of our Founding Fathers, who according to a letter to Senate leadership (found here in PDF form on the website of Utah Senator Mike Lee) would have cast a jaundiced eye on doing the business of the country during December’s “lame-duck” session; as if someone who sat on a committee for the past six years would be less capable of giving treaties “the most thorough scrutiny” than someone taking the job for the first time.
Far-right leaning bloggers like Grace Melton of The Foundry pulled out the fabled “threat to American sovereignty” argument that pops up whenever the United Nations is involved. A parent’s ability to homeschool children seems to be what’s most at risk here. Although, even the arch-conservative Washington Examiner made explicit that UN conventions “do not carry the force of law” in its December 2 editorial opposing the CRPD.
Pro-life advocates have seized on language in Article 25 of the CRPD that speaks to equal access to free or affordable health care programs for people with disabilities, including “in the area of sexual and reproductive health,” as a tacit affirmation of abortion, despite the fact that “The UN General Assembly has never defined the term as including abortion in either a non-binding resolution or a binding convention,” according to a fact sheet (PDF) distributed by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute.
Former senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum has been at the forefront of the opposition for all the above reasons plus the strange assertion, found in this Daily Beast article, among other places, that ratification of the CRPD would remove the United States from a position of leadership on the issue. “We should be telling the U.N., not the other way around, how to ensure dignity and respect for the disabled,” wrote Santorum.
Yet the position of leadership is exactly what the U.S. has relinquished by not ratifying the convention. In his support for the CRPD, Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) noted that only countries that have adopted the convention get to serve on the Committee that oversees implementation. Instead, the United States will stand idly by while the rest of the world elaborates on measures built on U.S. policy, as the Human Rights Watch organization pointed out in its December 5 blog entry for The Huffington Post:
The convention was inspired in part by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the US provided important technical assistance during the convention’s negotiation and drafting process. Like the ADA, the treaty embodies the basic principles of individual dignity and autonomy, non- discrimination, full inclusion and participation in society, equality of opportunity, accessibility, and respect for difference. The core protections of the treaty are the same as the protections in the US law, and the legal standards articulated by the treaty align with US disability law.
Supporters of the CRPD in the U.S. hold out hope that it will again be given consideration after the new senators are sworn in this coming January. Share your thoughts about whether or not ratification would help make life matter more for people with disabilities in the Comments.
Image by Gage Skidmore.