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CHAPTER 12 Voices Down Under: An Australian Perspective Heidi Forrest and Phillip French The negotiation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol is a monumental achievement of intergenerational significance. In the course of the negotiation process, the social relations of disability fundamentally changed, not only at the international level, but also within individual nations, including Australia. Indeed, at least for a time, the centrifugal power relations that scatter the needs and concerns of persons with disabilities to the periphery of their societies and of international relations were reversed. In their place, the UN system and many governments adopted a new and democratizing ethic of partnership and collaboration with persons with disabilities by placing them at its center. This ethic was as empowering of persons with disabilities as it was civilizing of international lawmaking. Persons with disabilities were invested with the opportunity to describe their lived experience in their own voices, to imagine a world in which they were not degraded and oppressed, and to be agents in the creation of a new legal paradigm that would attempt to capture those imaginings. In this chapter we provide an Australian perspective on the CRPD negotiation process. During the period of the CRPD development we were president (Heidi Forrest) and executive director (Phillip French) of People with Disability Australia (PWD-Australia). With a number of colleagues , it was our great privilege to participate in the CRPD consultation and negotiation processes at the national, regional, and international lev- Voices Down Under 189 els on behalf of persons with disabilities. Apart from our organizational roles, we both also have direct personal and family experience of impairment and disability. Our participation in the process was, therefore, experienced on a deeply intimate as well as on a public representational level. For this reason, we approach the task of recounting our CRPD adventure with some trepidation. In an important sense, it is simply not possible to reduce our public and private encounters to a single linear narrative. Yet encounters such as ours must be recorded, however incompletely , because the role civil society played in the development of the CRPD is now central to our collective identity as a disability rights movement . People with Disability Australia PWD-Australia is a national cross-disability rights and advocacy organization . It is a disabled people’s organization, and its active membership consists exclusively of persons with disabilities and organizations of persons with disabilities. PWD-Australia was founded initially in 1980, in the lead-up to the International Year of Disabled Persons in 1981, and ultimately as the result of a resolution carried at the conclusion of the First Handicapped Persons Conference held in Australia. It was founded to provide persons with disabilities with a direct “voice of our own,” adopting words that would become the motto of Disabled People’s International, which was established in the same year. Originally PWD-Australia was established at the state level in New South Wales; it later federated with other state and territory bodies to form Disabled Peoples International (Australia) (DPI(A)). However, DPI(A) collapsed in 1995 and for a period of seven years Australia lacked a national cross-disability coordinating mechanism and representative voice. To fill this lacuna, and following extensive consultations with members and colleagues, PWD-Australia amended its constitution in 2002 to resituate as an organization that operates at both the national and New South Wales levels. PWD-Australia’s work has always been framed in terms of human rights, and it has a very distinctive, activist, rights-based culture. Perhaps because of this, PWD-Australia was more acutely aware of the need for, and the potential of, an international treaty on disability rights. It meant that we were 190 Heidi Forrest and Phillip French instantly alert to movements within the UN system toward such a treaty, and that we were predisposed to engagement in its development. Working with the Australian Government The CRPD was developed during a period of ultraconservative Australian government, during which there was a significant retraction from previous commitments to human rights and disengagement from international human rights dialogue and institutions. In fact, during this period the Australian government positioned itself in the UN system as the leading critic of multilateral human rights institutions and oversight arrangements, openly questioning their legitimacy, integrity, and efficiency. Consistent with this position, the government was initially opposed to the development of an international instrument that would deal with the dignity and rights of persons with...

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