 |
Panorama of the UN, East River and New York |
Section
1
What is the Ratification Toolkit, and how
do I use it?
What is the Ratification Toolkit and how is it relevant
to DPI’s work?
- DPI’s commitment to the Convention development
process
At its Sixth World Assembly in Sapporo , Japan (Sapporo
Declaration),
and at other regional and national meetings, DPI members have
committed to fully supporting the ongoing work to draft a new
UN human rights Convention for persons with disabilities. To
this end, DPI members have been active at all stages of the
drafting negotiations at the UN: attending all meetings at
the UN; participating in drafting and policy paper initiatives;
holding consultations in our countries and regions; and helping
to provide a cross-disability perspective through the sharing
of the lived experiences of our members from around the world.
As the negotiations draw to a close, the time has come for
us to examine how we can next contribute to the successful
implementation of the Convention, and, as our first priority,
how we can work to encourage every country to join the new
Convention on the Human Rights of Persons with Disabilities!
- What the Ratification Toolkit can help you accomplish
To help get DPI members directly involved in this exciting
work, this “Ratification Toolkit” has been designed
as an interactive resource guide, providing information to
help DPI members:
- Learn about the Convention – its background and why
we need it
- Learn about ratification – what it is and why we
need countries to do it
- Learn how to design successful ratification campaigns in
DPI countries and regions
- What’s inside the Ratification Toolkit
You will find a variety of resources to help you plan and
implement your own ratification campaigns:
- Background information – explaining important concepts
and giving historical perspective
- A glossary – providing definitions of terms
- Exercises – to help you and your organization understand
and apply the concepts discussed in the Toolkit
- Documents – we have gathered many of the important
reference documents here, so that you have easy access to
them
Whether you have been extensively involved in the Convention
negotiations, or whether you are interested in getting involved,
we hope that the Toolkit will provide you with the information
you need to get started in your advocacy to get your country
to become a member of the new disability Convention!
How do I use the Ratification Toolkit?
The Toolkit is divided into four sections:
- User Guide - That’s this section!
- What is the UN disability convention and why is it needed?
This
section provides information on what a human rights convention
is, why we need the new UN disability Convention, and what
has been done so far to draft the Convention.
- How can we make the UN disability Convention successful?
This
section provides information on what “ratification” is
all about, and why it is important.
- How to get the UN disability Convention ratified in
your country!
This section provides some practical
tools for you to use in planning and implementing your
ratification campaign.
At the beginning of each section you’ll see a list of
what we hope you’ll take away from the materials. We
strongly suggest that to begin with, you read the sections
in order. Once you are more familiar with the content, then
you can go back to the sections of particular interest to you.
Each section can be reached directly from the Toolkit homepage,
so that you can quickly access the information of interest
to you.
Features we have tried to include
The Toolkit is designed to be interactive, meaning
that as you read through the text you can click on the clearly
marked hyperlinks in order to obtain further information as
you wish. For example, you can click on technical terms to
see how they are defined in the glossary. You can also
click on the names of documents in order to go to a copy of
the document. To make it easier to find a specific document,
we have grouped them again in resource boxes at the
end of each section, and you can go to a complete listing of
resources from the homepage.
We have provided in the Toolkit the most up-to-date information
available to us at this time. We have also included a few external
website links, so that in the future you will have a means
of up-dating information on certain topics – such as
information about the latest Convention text on the UN’s
webpage. If you have difficulty understanding something in
the toolkit or would like to talk about an idea you have for
your ratification campaign, you can contact your Regional Development
Officer (RDO). Their contact information is at the end of this
Section.
In each section you will find exercises to help you
think through the concepts discussed and apply them to the
specific situation in your country. You can do these exercises
by yourself or in a group with your colleagues and other
disability activists. We also hope that you will find the Toolkit
materials helpful as a starting point when you begin to prepare
your own materials for your ratification campaign.
DPI HQ has put a lot of time and energy into the development
of this toolkit for our members around the world. We know that
it will not be perfect and we encourage you to provide feedback
directly to us at the Headquarters Office by completing and
submitting the evaluation form at the end of the toolkit. We
want to learn what has worked, and what we can improve in the
future!
We have enjoyed the process of developing this tool kit, and
we hope very much that it will be a useful tool for you as
you work to get your government’s support for the new
Convention. As you will see there is a lot of work to be done,
and the challenges are many, but we believe that with careful
thought and planning DPI can make a solid contribution to this
next phase of the Convention process. Good luck!
UN Secretariat Building in NY
|
