Impact on 1.5 billion people .. An international conference in Qatar to promote the rights of people with disabilities

Imad Murad-Doha

As part of an international advocacy movement to promote the rights of persons with disabilities, the Doha International Conference on Disability and Development is devoting a global platform to discuss the issue of disability, which affects the lives of more than 1.5 billion people worldwide.

The conference, scheduled to start next Saturday in Doha, aims to radically change the plans of sustainable social development of governments, including all groups, especially people with disabilities, to achieve the slogan of the conference "so that no one is left behind."

The conference will be the first of its kind to seek complementarity between the UN human rights conventions and its conventions on sustainable development, aiming to serve as a reference for governments and international bodies to promote respect for the rights of persons with disabilities.

The conference will culminate in the launch of the Doha Declaration, which will develop a road map for the advancement of the rights of persons with disabilities, and will be an essential point of reference at the international level for the promotion of human rights and sustainable development in the context of disability.

The Doha Declaration aims primarily to outline a practical approach linking SDG strategies with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to convince governments that change through a combination of rights and development is not wishful thinking. To investigate.

Human Rights and Development
The conference seeks to find the best solutions in aligning the human rights approach with the sustainable development approach in order to bring about change.This conference is of interest to global civil society groups to ensure that the two approaches are applied together to ensure that the voice of persons with disabilities takes center stage in any future change process.

The conference will witness ten discussion sessions on the political commitment of States to the rights of their communities with disabilities, through high-level commitments and commitments from global leaders.

These sessions will explore ways to link the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals with a view to maximizing their benefits at the level of education, employment, children, health and well-being.

The panel discussions will also seek to formulate a policy based on useful data while reviewing international development assistance with a view to advancing the UN human rights and development approaches through adherence to the Doha Declaration.

Global experiences
The two-day conference, with significant international and local participation, seeks to explain the challenges facing the rights of persons with disabilities, review the most important global experiences to overcome them, and aim to mobilize the efforts of persons with disabilities, international actors in the United Nations system and responsible regional systems on human rights and sustainable development such as World Bank, UNDP and UNDG.

In a statement to Al Jazeera Net, Salim Al Enezi, a spokesman for the Qatar Foundation for Social Action, said that the conference is an opportunity to bring about an important transformation to achieve the inclusive development of persons with disabilities through twinning between the efforts of jurists who approved the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and development. Who endorsed the SDGs 2030.

He adds that the conference is a global platform where policy makers, governments, bilateral and multilateral actors, civil society organizations, organizations of persons with disabilities, experts and academics from around the world can share views and experiences on how and how best to bring these approaches together for a future. No one is excluded.

He considered the conference an opportunity to frame a viable approach to linking the SDG strategies to the UN Convention on Persons with Disabilities.This gives the possibility to convince governments that change through pairing and combining both drivers is not only desirable and wishful thinking, but it is already possible and achievable.