"Successive UK governments – mostly Conservative-led – have failed to take any action to address six key disability rights recommendations made by the UN over the last decade, according to the human rights watchdog.
Among the areas where governments have failed to act are calls to introduce a right to independent living, to examine the overall impact of austerity on disabled people, and to do more to stop disability hate crime.
The failings emerged from a set of more than 200 assessments by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) of whether the UK and Welsh governments have taken action to address human rights recommendations made by independent experts on UN committees.
They include recommendations made by the UN committees associated with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and other human rights treaties the UK government has signed and ratified.
The assessments examine whether the government has taken all the action recommended by the committees, significant action, some action, inconsistent action, or no action.
Analysis of the reports through EHRC’s ongoing Human Rights Tracker project shows the UK government has failed to take any action at all on six disability rights recommendations, as well as only taking some action on more than 25 recommendations linked to the rights of disabled people, such as inclusive education, benefit sanctions, and access to healthcare.
One failure to act was on the call in 2017 for the UK government to recognise in UK law disabled people’s right to live independently and be included in the community, so it can be enforced in UK courts.
Such a right was one of the demands made before the last general election by the Disabled People’s Manifesto.
EHRC said successive governments have also refused to take any action to assess the cumulative impact of austerity measures on disabled people and other marginalised groups, a recommendation first made by the UN committee on the rights of persons with disabilities in 2016.
The repeated failure to carry out such an assessment came even though the commission provided a model for how it could be done in 2018, when it published its own cumulative impact assessment of social security reforms.
That work was seen as “a vindication” of years of campaigning by grassroots groups such as WOWcampaign to persuade the government to carry out such an assessment.
Another recommendation ignored by successive UK governments is the call to incorporate CRPD into UK law, made by the UN’s committee on the rights of persons with disabilities in 2017.
Labour dropped its long-standing pledge to implement the treaty into UK law in the run-up to last year’s general election.
EHRC also pointed to the failure to act on last year’s call by the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights committee for the UK government to take action to provide equal protection from hate crime to all protected groups, including disabled people.
The Law Commission called in 2021 for equal protection for all groups covered by hate crime laws, including disabled people, although the new government has pledged to review all the Law Commission’s recommendations.
The Law Commission report said the current hate crime regime was “widely seen as unfair and sends a distinctly negative message to victims of hate crimes on the basis of disability, sexual orientation and transgender identity”.
And EHRC said that both the UK government and the Welsh government had failed to create a legal duty for local authorities to fund sign language lessons for parents of Deaf children, more than seven years after the UN committee on the rights of persons with disabilities had called for action.
The EHRC assessments also show that the UK government has ignored calls from the UN committees on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) to take action on intersectional discrimination.
Successive governments have refused to implement section 14 of the Equality Act on dual discrimination, the commission said.
Baroness [Kishwer] Falkner, EHRC’s chair, said: “Our Human Rights Tracker is a unique online tool which allows everyone to monitor the status of key human rights issues in the UK.”
She said the tracker would allow the UK and Welsh governments, and the public, “to keep track of what needs to be done to implement international obligations and improve human rights in Britain”": Watchdog shows UK has taken zero action in response to UN recommendations in six areas of disability rights – Disability News Service
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