New Zealand's second review against the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The List of Issues for New Zealand has been released by the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (12 March 2018, Geneva time). This started New Zealand's second review against the Disability Convention.

What does the List of Issues say?

Every government that has ratified the Convention has to provide regular progress reporting to the UN. The ‘List of Issues’ is the list of questions the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities wants the government to report back on.

This List of Issues (2018) has 100 questions which cover most articles in the Convention. For example, the List of Issues asks for information about education, employment, accessibility, health, data, seclusion and restraint. 

You can find the List of Issues on the UN website here: http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/TreatyBodyExternal/Countries.aspx?CountryCode=NZL&Lang=EN

You can read Minister Sepuloni's, the Minister for Disability Issues, media release here: https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/united-nations-review-opportunity-improve-rights-disabled-people

Read the Government's report to the UN Disability Committee

The Government has written a report to answer the 100 questions asked by the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This report was sent to the UN Committee on 9 March 2019.

The report provides information on what the Government has done over the past four years to put the Disability Convention into action. It includes information on education employment, health, justice, transport, housing, data, accessibility and much more.

The report provides a snapshot of where things are at currently. While good progress has been made there are still areas for improvement.

You can read the Government's response to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons for Disabilities here in various formats:

The Government's response to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities [DOCX, 205 KB](Word version)

Summary - The Government's response to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (PDF version) [PDF, 108 KB]

NZSL Version

 

 EasyRead versions

The summary of Government's response to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities - EasyRead (Word version) [DOCX, 6.7 MB]

The summary of Government's response to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities - EasyRead (PDF version) [DOCX, 6.7 MB]

HTML version

Read the summary of the Government's response to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (HTML version)

Large Print version

The summary of the Government's response to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities - large print version [PDF, 123 KB]

The report will be added in Audio when available. 

To order a copy of the report in braille, please send an email to odi@msd.govt.nz.

Next steps

The Government will be invited to Geneva to appear before the UN Committee. The Committee will then give the Government recommendations (called 'concluding observations') on what we can do to better implement the Disability Convention.

The Independent Monitoring Mechanism is running a seperate process to provide feedback to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. You can keep up to date with this process and opportunities to feed into their report here: www.hrc.co.nz/international-reporting/rights-disabled-people/ .

The UN review process - key stages

  1. The National Human Rights organisation provides a 'Shadow Report' to the UN Committee to help them decide what questions they should ask in the List of Issues
  2. The 'List of Issues prior to reporting' (the list of questions) is released by the UN Committee - 13 March 2018
  3. The 'State Party Report' (a report) is due to the UN Committee - 9 March 2019
  4. New Zealand government delegation appears before the UN Committee (the review in Geneva) - September/October 2019 (date not confirmed)
  5. 'Concluding Observations' (recommendations) released by the UN Committee - October/November 2019 (date not confirmed)
  6. Follow up response by New Zealand government to Concluding Observations (a report) - November 2019 onwards

You can Read the Convention here.

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