Mexican
Disability Advocate at Center of UN Negotiations
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In November 2001 Maria Eugenia Antunes, a young
disability advocate from Mexico City, found herself in the middle
of high level United Nations negotiations. She also had the intense
experience of living in New York City for November-December, working
at the Mexican Mission to the UN. How did this come about?
The new Vincente Fox government, with an active Office
on Disability, decided last year that a UN Convention on the Rights
of Disabled Persons was a good idea and decided to sponsor a resolution
on this topic. However, other countries were not so sure, or for
various reasons, they thought this was not the right time to suggest
it. But a lot of the world's poorest countries, especially
those in the Latin American region, decided it was a great idea
and agreed to co-sponsor it.
The Mexican Mission to the UN was all of a sudden
in the middle of a storm of negotiations, letters, emails, phone
calls and visits from representatives of a large number of governments.
A small disability delegation, including Maria Antunes who uses
a wheelchair, was brought from Mexico to provide assistance and
disability expertise. They had only a short time to convince other
governments that disabled people around the world need a UN Convention
to protect their human rights, and that now was better than later.
The Mexican team was 100% successful: in late December
during its last meeting of 2001 the United Nations General Assembly
adopted the Mexican resolution. Now, as Maria Antunes says, the
challenge really begins-working together to find common ground
with people who speak many different languages and who have different
ideas about what a Convention should say. For the next year, it
will be the job of the Mexican government and disability rights
advocates to lead this search for a common ground.
Maybe for the first time since the UN was created
over 50 years ago, disability advocates will be at the center of
diplomatic efforts to develop a human rights convention, and at
the center of this group will surely be Latinos with disabilities.
In 2000 Maria Antunes, known as Maru, was one of 35 young, disabled
women selected by Rehabilitation International and the World Institute
on Disability for its training and advocacy seminar held at the
United Nations. The seminar brought together disabled women from
around the world to take part in the week-long United Nations Beijing+5
event. Held five years after its Beijing conference for women, Beijing+5
was organized by the UN to review progress and plan future actions
to improve the lives of women worldwide.
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