New Permanent Representative of Uzbekistan to the United Nations Murad Askarov signed Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on behalf of Uzbekistan on February 27 2009.
The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol was adopted on December 13 2006 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, and was opened for signature on March 30 2007. The Convention entered into force on May 3 2008. It was signed by 139 countries and ratified by 49 states.
The Convention protects interests of over 650 million people with the disabilities, about 80% of them leave in least developed states.
The Convention marks a “paradigm shift” in attitudes and approaches to persons with disabilities. It takes to a new height the movement from viewing persons with disabilities as “objects” of charity, medical treatment and social protection towards viewing persons with disabilities as “subjects” with rights, who are capable of claiming those rights and making decisions for their lives based on their free and informed consent as well as being active members of society. The Convention is intended as a human rights instrument with an explicit, social development dimension. It adopts a broad categorization of persons with disabilities and reaffirms that all persons with all types of disabilities must enjoy all human rights and fundamental freedoms. It clarifies and qualifies how all categories of rights apply to persons with disabilities and identifies areas where adaptations have to be made for persons with disabilities to effectively exercise their rights and areas where their rights have been violated, and where protection of rights must be reinforced.
