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Putting the Disabled in the Picture
Yoko Nakanishi is attending the Social Summit in an unusual capacity. She is a member of the Japanese delegation as a consultant to the officials, but is also at the meeting in her capacity as an NGO representative who fights for the rights of disabled people.
Fifty-three-year-old Nakanishi was stricken with poliomyelitis when she was one-week-old. She whizzes around the halls of the Palais de Nations listening to the negotiations, attending workshops and talking to delegates in her official capacity.
But she says she also spends time listening to grass-roots organisations talking about
disability
“What I am hearing is not very encouraging;” she says.
“The Social Summit debate is hardly talking about persons with disability, but seems bogged down with the complexes of globalisation which is really not about putting people in the front of the debate.”
Nakanishi, however, hopes to translate her disappointment into shaping her activities. As the head of Asia Disability Institute, an NGO she started in 1990. She says her experience at this conference is now allowing her to begin to re-evaluate her approach to her work.
“My experience in Geneva has reinforced the notion that issues must be viewed from a global perspective and not from the narrow angles of formulating strategy that is only based on our
disability,” she says.
Apart from advocacy work in Japan, her organisation is involved in helping NGOs from Asia working with persons with disability to improve local conditions.
Last year she sponsored a Philippine participant to a UN meeting on disability in Hong Kong. One of her goals is to get more persons with disability to participate in decision-making at both the national and international level.
She says she was particularly pleased with the results of the UN Decade for Disabled Persons between 1983 and 1992, which helped raise consciousness among the public and government in Japan about the conditions of the disabled. This she feels led to the enactment last August of the Barrier-Free Transportation Law, which ensures accessible public transportation for senior citizens and those with physical disabilities. In addition, the UN programmes have helped people with disability and the public to realise their rights, she says. “These are major breakthroughs,” she adds.
Read TerraViva
The IPS renowned international newspaper will publish a special edition in Geneva, at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (Copenhagen+5). Follow the conference on line day by day from June 26 through July 1, with exclusive reports by a team of 13 IPS journalists from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, North America and Latin America.
A selection of the IPS Coverage from Geneva will also be carried by TerraViva Daily Journal (New York) and TerraViva Europe (Brussels),.
Has the world lived up to its 1996 commitments..?
Solidarity 2000 starting 17th of June!
MS's big summer event Solidarity 2000 will start very soon now, with a week-long variety of debates and arrangements. The activities range from encounters between young people from Balkan, Africa and Central America to big conferences on the planet's social development and environment.
Judge by yourself:
The 1996 Copenhagen Social Summit final report in English, French and Spanish.