Blogs

Day 3, Friday 3 September 2010. 10.15am. Hello everyone – we’re 45 minutes late starting, which seems to be the norm. Also I have a meeting elsewhere at midday so need to leave here at 11.30am. Yesterday a commenter on the blog said that it was not so interesting to read that I had a chicken salad for lunch, so this commenter will be pleased to know I had a multi-grain bagel with cream cheese for breakfast. Today it’s cooler, but the big news is that hurricane Earl is heading to NYC! Some delegates are worried about getting home (but secretly hoping they are ‘stranded’ in New York. Macy’s is just up the road).

I've been very bad at blogging. There really is no excuse, apart from the fact that we're very busy at MDAC. We are constantly very busy, of course, and I am sure that other organisations are also very busy but they find time to blog. So, I promise to do better in the future! The next instillation of this blog will be next week because MDAC will be at UN CRPD COSP at UN HQ in NYC. Is that clear? If you like words rather than acronyms, read on. COSP stands for 'Conference of States Parties'. What this means is that the governments who ratify a treaty get together in a big meeting. This COSP is the for those governments which have ratified the CRPD, which is the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. You probably know what this is, but if you don't take a look at www.un.org/disabilities to find out. Nerds will see that Article 40 is about COSP.

The Mental Disability Advocacy Center is attending the Third Session of the Conference of States Parties (COSP) to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) at the UN headquarters in New York, 1-3 September 2010. The COSP will focus on the theme, “Implementing the Convention through Advancing Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities”, and will include sessions in plenary, as well as roundtable discussions and interactive sessions between government and civil society. MDAC will be blogging from the floor of the meeting.

2010 promises to be MDAC’s busiest year so far. Together with our NGO partners, we will continue our strategic litigation and advocacy work in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia and Estonia. This year, MDAC is stepping up our focus on implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). A project funded by the UK Government will start in April 2010 to research how governments in Europe are setting up independent bodies to monitor the implementation of the CRPD. In addition, funding from the Zennström Philanthropies will enable us to deepen our focus on legal capacity, one of the key issues of the CRPD. Zennström Philanthropies is also supporting a new project on assessing the ways in which inspectorates are monitoring mental health and social care institutions, and MDAC will be able to assist them to strengthen their competencies in this area.

10am, Wednesday 21 October 2009. Hello!

10am, Friday 4 September. Delegates are piling in, from having tanked up with coffee at the Vienna Café which is just outside the huge conference room 4 where this meeting is taking place. It’s also where the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) was negotiated.

3pm. Here we are at the “informal Session on Emerging Issue: The global economic crisis, poverty and the implementation of the Convention” The Co-Chair is again H. E. Amb. Jim McLay (New Zealand). He says that two strands: pwd are over-represented among the very poor, and they are disproportionally affected by the economic crisis: what can we do about it? MDG on poverty will not be achieved without a focus on people with disabilities. What are we going to do about this, and what can we do?