From Disability News Service:
“Governments
‘overwhelmingly failed’ to protect disability rights during pandemic”
Governments
around the world – including the UK’s – have “overwhelmingly failed” to protect
disabled people’s rights in responding to the global pandemic, according to the
results of a major international survey. This has had “dire consequences”, with
thousands of avoidable and preventable deaths and other “serious human rights
abuses”, says a report based on the survey.
The COVID-19
Disability Rights Monitor (DRM) project aims to “raise the alarm globally”
about the “catastrophic impact” of the pandemic on disabled people worldwide. The
testimonies of disabled people gathered for the report “show just how
precarious the situation is”, says the report. The project was set up by seven
disability rights organisations, including International Disability Alliance
and European Network on Independent Living. It particularly highlights “inadequate”
measures to protect disabled people in institutions; a “significant and fatal”
breakdown of community support; and the disproportionate impact on
under-represented groups of disabled people, such as children, women, homeless
people, and those living in remote and rural locations. It also highlights the
denial of access to healthcare, including discrimination in triage,
unaffordable medication, and the inability of disabled people to leave home to
access essential healthcare and medication, as well as “alarming testimonies”
that disabled people have been “denied or deprived of life-saving treatment for
COVID-19 on the basis of disability, resulting in many preventable deaths”.
The report says
that disabled people are reporting “being left behind” during the pandemic in
both wealthy and developing countries. And it warns that some governments have
“actively pursued” policies that have led to “wide-scale violations of the
rights to life and health of disabled people”. Other rights impacted by government
policies include the rights to liberty; freedom from torture, ill-treatment,
exploitation, violence and abuse; independent living and inclusion in the
community; and inclusive education. One of the most common faults has been the
failure to “genuinely include” disabled people in national responses to the
pandemic, with “policymakers at many levels” appearing to have reverted to
treating disabled people as “objects of care or control, undermining many of
the gains of recent years to enhance citizenship, rights, and inclusion”. The
report is based on responses to a survey from more than 2,100 individuals and
organisations from 134 countries, most of them disabled people and their
representative organisations.
It includes
evidence from more than 3,000 written testimonies by disabled people and family
members of their experiences during the pandemic. But only 26 governments and
12 human rights institutions responded to efforts to secure their evidence. In
some countries, the report found, breaking coronavirus curfew rules was “a
matter of life and death”.
An Army veteran
with post-traumatic stress disorder was shot and killed in the Philippines, and
a respondent from a Ugandan disabled people’s organisation (DPO) said they knew
of two Deaf people who were shot at “because they were outside in curfew time”
and “didn’t know what was happening”, while another Ugandan respondent said
that a disabled woman had been beaten up after curfew time while looking for
food.
Almost one
third (633) of survey respondents, across 81 countries, said that disabled
people in their country could not access food, with Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya,
Bangladesh, India, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, Rwanda and Peru the countries
with the highest proportion of respondents reporting this.
The experience
of disabled people in the UK was mentioned several times in the report. Respondents
from around the world said they were living in fear of the police. In Europe,
respondents from the UK, Italy and France said they were “afraid to leave their
homes” while many believed the police were “unreasonable and heavy-handed”. The
UK government’s failures are mentioned several other times in the report,
including widely reported concerns about access to healthcare. One UK DPO said:
“A eugenics programme has been undertaken covertly… Do Not Resuscitate Notices
(DNRs) were placed on people with no consultation, especially older persons and
persons with learning disabilities.”
Testimonies
from the UK, Canada, USA, Austria, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Georgia, France
and South Africa said their governments “indicated” that hospital triage should
discriminate against disabled COVID-19 patients if there was a shortage of
hospital places. The report also says: “The countries with the most written
testimonies about the lack of [personal protective equipment] and cleanliness
in institutions were the USA, the UK, Canada, Ireland, and South Africa.” It
adds: “Respondents from Australia, the USA, the UK, and Colombia complained
that their government spread misinformation or confusing information about the
state of emergency.” And it says: “More than 25 per cent of respondents from
Belgium, Canada, France, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom
said that persons with disabilities did not have access to food during the
pandemic.”
^ This shows
only a small portion of what the disabled around the world has had to deal with
during the Pandemic. The real and much more horrible scoop won’t be known until
after things return to normal and by then an untold number of people could be
needlessly dead. The disabled are not pawns to be used and abused by anyone
(people or Governments.) There is still time to fix the grave mistakes so that
more disabled are not discriminated against, do not have to worry about
healthcare or food, etc. ^
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