TITLE: Platform Amendment – United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
SPONSOR: Youth Caucus
Passed in a vote by a majority of the caucus steering committee on our 12/17/17 conference call.
BACKGROUND:
The United States is one of the few counties worldwide that has not ratified this document recognizing the rights of persons with disabilities.
PROPOSAL:
Section being addressed:
II. Social Justice
1. Civil Rights & Equal Rights
6. Rights of the Disabled
Current language of the platform plank being addressed
B. Aggressively implement the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Proposed addition to follow after the current language noted above:
C. The Green Party supports the ratification of the United Nations Convention on Rights for Persons with Disabilities as well as the Optional Protocol.
(Re-lettering all of the items below it)
REFERENCES:
Contact Information:
Michael Dennis – michael@gp.org
This is valuable in that it points to the need for political action. Namely, the need for ratification of the treaty by the U. S. Senate which in its 2012 vote failed to do so by six votes. It is important for the GPUS to mention including the Optional Protocol. When the U. S. Government signed on to the convention, did the submission for the Senate vote include the Protocol, which allows individual citizens to bring action directly to the U. N.?
I support the added language due to the need for Senate action, and because in some ways the UN document is more comprehensive. Not sure what “aggressively implement” means relative to the Americans with Disabilities Act. What I would like to see is some FUNDING attached to the unfunded mandates affecting public transit which form a substantial part of the ADA. Currently, the required door to door paratransit is provided at the expense of the budget for fixed-route service, stressing the already-inadequate operating budgets of transit agencies and reducing the span of service that could be provided to both fixed-route and paratransit users absent the mandates. Paratransit often costs 15 to 20 times more per passenger mile than fixed-route service, forcing underfunded transit agencies to use up to half their operating budgets to serve perhaps 3% of their passengers. I support as a civil right the access to the community provided by paratransit for those who need it, but there are other disabilities, such as sightlessness and epilepsy, that foreclose driving as an option but do not necessarily foreclose the use of fixed-route service to meet transportation needs. People with such disabilities are penalized by being tapped as the source of funding for the more expensive service needed by people with other disabilities. Elsewhere, the Green Platform does recognize the need for far more generous funding for public transit, and I would stress the relevance of this issue here, particularly for OPERATING funding. We should take after countries whose fuel taxes are high enough to substantially underwrite public transit operations; drivers of private vehicles benefit from driving on less congested roads, and from avoiding the cost of constantly expanding the road system, since fixed-route public transit makes far more efficient use of existing roadways than proliferating private vehicles. Forty people in a bus, together with the vehicle’s safe stopping distance, take up about 250 lane feet. The same forty people, each in a private car including the safe stopping distance of each, take up well over a lane mile. We should do everything possible to make the fixed route option viable as a central focus of our transportation system.
I strongly support this proposal. The UN proposal is much more comprehensive than existing US legislation.
Support this. Brother was a paraplegic and it was a constant struggle to deal with incomplete sidewalks, sidewalk widths and more
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