Thanks so much for this sharing. Congratulations too to Professor Mary
Crocks and Ron and their team.
Lauro Original message:
> Protecting refugees with disabilities
> 1 May 2014
> University of Sydney researchers have gained unprecedented access to
> refugee populations in six countries to chart disabilities amongst
> refugees and prepare recommendations to the United Nations High
> Commissioner for Refugees.
> Professor Mary Crock
> <http://sydney.edu.au/law/about/people/profiles/mary.crock.php> is
> coordinating the DFAT-funded initiative, Protection of Refugees with
> Disabilities, with fellow chief investigators from the Sydney Law
> School, Emeritus Professor Ron McCallum
> <http://sydney.edu.au/law/about/people/profiles/ron.mccallum.php> and
> Future Fellow, Professor Ben Saul
> <http://sydney.edu.au/law/about/people/profiles/ben.saul.php>.
> The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)
> <http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/conventionfull.shtml> acts
> as a framework for the team's wide-reaching research. Professor
> McCallum is a founding member and Chair of the CRPD Committee which
> oversees this convention.
> "We're using the framework of this new convention to look at the way
> the UNHCR counts and includes refugees and how they are being treated.
> As you can imagine, it's not a happy story," said Professor Crock.
> "Up until now very few people have really thought about persons with
> disabilities in refugee situations. This seems to be ironic, because
> you would think that war creates disabilities and so you are likely to
> get a lot of people in camps with disabilities.
> "On the contrary, a lot of people think - and there seems to be this
> fiction - that refugees only travel if they are 'whole bodied', that
> people with disabilities don't make it out so they are just not there.
> "In fact, when you ask the UNHCR for their statistics on how many
> refugees they have on their books or have acknowledged, they give you a
> tiny percentage relative to what the World Health Organization tells us
> we ought to expect in any given population," she added.
> The UNHCR is providing extensive support to the University of Sydney on
> the project, which unpacks the practical and cultural barriers to the
> protection of disabled refugees in host countries regularly featured in
> Australia's refugee and resettlement debate.
> The team is also trialling a Disability Identification Tool for
> displaced populations. If adopted, the tool could serve as a valuable
> aid to UNHCR and other workers seeking to better identify, assist and
> protect refugees with disabilities.
> "One of the problems with properly identifying people with disabilities
> in the correct way is that there has been a tendency to rely upon
> self-reporting or a visual of a person to identify an incapacity that
> they have," said Professor Crock.
> "But in fact, disability under the Convention is not so much about your
> incapacity, rather it's about what barriers exist to allowing you to
> participate properly in the community."
> The project began in 2012 with fieldwork in Malaysia and Indonesia,
> followed by a scoping mission to Pakistan where the team was given data
> on nearly one million refugees. The team recently returned from their
> largest fieldwork project yet, spending three weeks in Uganda, where
> they worked with the UNHCR and local disabled persons' organisations to
> reach and survey over 1,000 refugees.
> The team is finding that people with disabilities are made especially
> vulnerable by situations of displacement. However, governments and
> humanitarian assistance providers currently lack the knowledge base to
> appropriately assess and respond to their material and legal protection needs.
> Fieldwork and interviews have yielded stories and visual evidence of
> extreme poverty, sexual and physical abuse, and torture among disabled
> refugees. Stigma and discrimination emerged as commonplace.
> "Across our six countries, we have a really wide variety of places
> where refugees interact with UNHCR and with the community wherever they
> are. We go from urban refugees to asylum seekers who are living very
> tenuously in the community to countries where they are invisible to the
> government of the day," said Professor Crock.
> The team, assisted by researcher Laura Smith-Khan, is working closely
> with the UNHCR by sending the agency detailed reports after each
> country visit. Next, they will visit Turkey and Jordan, two of the main
> destination countries for people seeking asylum from the ongoing
> conflict in Syria.
> "I'm hoping that we can follow this up with another project, where we
> can embed ourselves with UNHCR to do a specific trial with the
> Disability Identification Tool that we are suggesting they need to
> adopt," said Professor Crock.
> Watch Professor Mary Crock explain her work.
> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyP3k8ddwNc>
> Contact: Luke O'Neill
> Phone: 02 9114 1961
> Email: [log in to unmask]
> <mailto:5a272a5c5d0b343f03065e392b49080f513d1e3307347c3202>
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