Human Rights Watch

Well – it will be a tough act to follow all these great updates! New York City just seems somehow less exciting in comparison – something I bet doesn’t get said too often! This summer I’m interning in the New York City offices of Human Rights Watch. I decided to stay in the city for the summer because I spent the year before starting at Fordham in Zambia working with an organization that provided direct services to clients, and so I wanted to see what human rights work looked like from another side.

I’m working on disability rights (see www.hrw.org/en/disability-rights), which is currently housed under the Health and Human Rights Division. Since I’m guessing many of you don’t know too much about disability rights (I certainly didn’t when I started!), I’ll start with a little bit of background. The human rights community as a whole, and Human Rights Watch itself, has only recently become more engaged in disability rights and there is a lot of research and advocacy that needs to happen to address discrimination and human rights violations against persons with disabilities worldwide.

Much of my work draws on the new UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which reflects a paradigm shift in thinking about disability. Historically, a disability has been seen as something to cure or fix, and a person with a disability seen as an object deserving of charity and welfare. The CRPD instead uses a rights-based approach: persons with disabilities have equal rights and it is society that needs to adapt to remove barriers faced by persons with disabilities. The US signed the CRPD last year, the first international human rights treaty it has signed in nearly a decade!

One interesting thing about the CRPD is that the negotiations featured unprecedented participation from civil society, particularly disabled peoples’ organizations and persons with disabilities themselves, which reflects the motto of the global disability rights movement: “Nothing about us, without us.”

The CRPD doesn’t define disability, but it does describe a person with a disability as someone who has an impairment (physical, mental, intellectual, or sensory) that may limit their full participation in society. Looking at this description, it is clear that while many people think of disability as something that only happens to other people, in reality everyone probably knows someone with a disability. It could be something like a broken leg that requires crutches, or a loss of mobility or agility due to aging, or a learning disability like dyslexia. Even bad eyesight could be a disability, except that we have adapted with glasses and contacts so that it is no longer a barrier. Indeed, the UN estimates that at least 10% of the world’s population lives with a disability (more than 660 million people), with this figure increasing through population growth, medical advances and the natural aging process of large numbers of people. Food for thought!

Human Rights Watch’s current research includes investigations of human rights violations against women and girls with disabilities in northern Uganda and deinstitutionalization in Croatia. In addition to helping out on these reports, I’ve written about HIV/AIDS and persons with disabilities, inclusive education, forced psychiatric treatment and forced sterilizations, making written works accessible to persons with visual disabilities, and specific situations affecting persons with disabilities in Macedonia, Malaysia, Nepal, China, Hungary, and Tanzania.

Interning at Human Rights Watch has been really amazing so far – the people are fabulous, the work has been challenging and interesting, and I am learning new things every day. The office culture is very relaxed and collegial (there has even been hula-hooping!), but everyone is extremely dedicated and passionate about what they are doing. One great thing about Human Rights Watch is that they have a well-developed internship program, so interns get up to speed quickly and are encouraged to get to know what people in different divisions are doing. For example, there is a weekly event where staff members come and speak to the interns about their work (held in the conference room where HRW's Nobel Prize is displayed!), and I have also volunteered at the HRW Film Festival and an awareness event on political prisoners in Burma (see www.hrw.org/en/free-burmas-prisoners).

My challenges have been: 1) writing advocacy documents for the general public instead of for lawyers (legalese has apparently become my default language ... thanks law school!); and 2) that, as mentioned, I came in without knowing much about disability rights so I am learning as I go. I’ve had more than one day where I read for 4 or 5 hours about a specific topic so I could write a page or two about it. (I’m getting quicker though, I hope!)

As a final thought, I’d encourage all of you awesome Leitner interns to look around and consider how your organization is serving persons with disabilities and what you can to improve things – it can be as simple as making your office more physically accessible, printing a version of any materials you produce in a larger font size, or including persons with disabilities in statistics and research projects. It’s pretty simple: including persons with disabilities means including everyone.