Human rights and international treaties

On this page:

• Public hearings
• What is the CRPD?
• What is OPCAT?
• Find out more about human rights

If you get lost in the international human rights vocabulary, check out our human rights jargon buster!

Public hearings focused on human rights

Public hearing 18: The human rights of people with disability and making the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities a reality in Australian law, policies and practices was live streamed on 8 and 9 November 2021. Our Vice President Kelly Cox and Senior Research Officer Frances Quan Farrant were in a panel with First Peoples Disability Network’s Damian Griffis and June Riemer on Monday afternoon, talking about our work in human rights, disability advocacy and holding government accountable for how Australia treats people with disability.

Find out more about the hearing at the Disability Royal Commission’s website.

We were live on Twitter both days at @PWDAustralia. Catch up on Monday’s thread here, starting with human rights lawyer and UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Committee Vice Chair Rosemary Kayess and our former Co-CEO Therese Sands. (If you want to hear more from Rosemary, here’s our former president Bonnie Millen interviewing her at our 2018 AGM).

The part of the thread about our panel with FPDN begins from this tweet.

On Tuesday, we heard from Christina Ryan of the Disability Leadership Institute, several more human rights experts and a panel of government representatives. Tuesday’s thread starts here.

Note that sometimes Twitter truncates threads and you need to tap “show more replies” to see the rest!

Public hearing 31: Vision for an inclusive Australia was held from 12 to 16 December 2022. Building on evidence previously heard about the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, including in Public hearing 18, this hearing will explore what should be done to create a more inclusive society that supports people with disability to live independently and free from violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation. It will examine the progress of the Australian Disability Strategy and how it is being implemented.

Our live Twitter threads:

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday

Plus, check out our submission to the DRC: Vision for realising our human rights. We also made a joint submission with the Human Rights Law Centre and Children and Young People with Disability Australia, calling for a national human rights charter.

But what is the CRPD?

Everyone has human rights worth protecting. That can look different for people with disability. Human rights violations might seem normal to many people because of ableism, ignorance and power dynamics. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) gets specific about our rights. It tells governments what it looks like to support the human rights of people with disability in their work. This includes:

• Our right to be free and safe
• Our right to equal access – to transport, buildings, information, services…
• Our right to be part of the community, including choice and control about where we live and who we live with
• Our right to make decisions about important things in our lives, including controlling our own money and having support to make decisions

Kelly Cox and Damien Griffis at the CRPD review in Geneva, 2019.

PWDA helped make the CRPD happen in 2006 by organising consultations and sending people with disability to the UN to advocate for it. In 2012 and 2019, we were part of the groups of non-government organisations that told the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities about Australia’s slow progress in implementing the CRPD. People with disability across the country told us about their experiences through our national survey and other consultations, helping to create the Civil Society Shadow Report, and we were part of a delegation of people with disability and our organisations that presented that report to the Committee and told them our stories.

Find out more about the CRPD

• The Convention in Brief from the United Nations website
• Disability Discrimination Commissioner Ben Gauntlett summarised some of Australia’s top disability rights problems in his speech to the CRPD committee.
• The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities – An Assessment of Australia’s Level of Compliance research report from the Disability Royal Commission
• Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Shining a light on Social Transformation research report also from the Disability Royal Commission
• An Easy Read guide to the CRPD from the UK government

What is OPCAT?

We also use other international conventions and treaties in our work, such as the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (also known as OPCAT). The original Convention Against Torture (CAT) spells out the rights of people who have been detained in any formal way – such as:

• jail or prison, including youth detention
• immigration detention
• locked psychiatric wards and hospitals
• secure housing for people with disability
• school ‘time out’ rooms
• aged care facilities, dementia units and nursing homes
• child welfare institutions, out of home care and boarding schools.

OPCAT is an extra agreement that says we will make sure all those places are regularly checked out to see if they are following the rules. Find out more about OPCAT and Australia’s progress on implementing it from the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Find out more about human rights

We do much of our human rights work as part of DPO Australia, a group of national disability representative organisations. Find out more about specific rights on DPO Australia’s website:

• All CRPD factsheets in DOC format
• Position Paper: Disability Inclusive National Preventive Mechanism (NPM)
• Equality Before the Law and Supported Decision-Making
• Discrimination Against Migrants and Refugees with Disability
• Forced Treatment and Restrictive Practices
• Indefinite Detention of Persons with Disability Within the Criminal Justice System
  • See also Australia Urged to Amend Laws that Lead to People with Mental Disabilities Being Detained Indefinitely and ACDA Submission to Senate Inquiry into Indefinite Detention of People with Cognitive and Psychiatric Impairment in Australia
• Violence and Abuse Against Persons with Disability
• Employment of Persons with Disability
  • See also Future of Supported Employment Consultation
• Forced Sterilisation of People with Disability and People with Intersex Variations
  • See also Submission to the Australian Human Rights Commission Consultation Paper: Protecting the Human Rights of People Born with Variations in Sex Characteristics in the context of Medical Interventions

We’ve also made a number of submissions to the Disability Royal Commission. These reports include information we’ve gathered through our individual advocacy work supporting people with disability, research partnerships, and other policy work. We make recommendations about what needs to change to make sure the human rights of people with disability are respected.

• Charters of human rights benefit people with disability
• Vision for realising our human rights
• Fighting for the right to authentic inclusion
• People with disability need effective safeguards
• We have a right to choose homes without violence
• Realising our right to be safe in emergencies
• Realising our right to live independently in the community

Other research:

• Introduction to disability, rights and law reform in Australia: Pushing beyond legal futures