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Have your say! Australia is being reviewed by the United Nations

By April 12, 2019May 29th, 2019No Comments

Australia signed up to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities(CRPD) in 2008. This means Australia has made a commitment to protect and promote the rights of people with disability.  The main way that Australian Governments are doing this, is through the National Disability Strategy.

Every four years, the Australian government has to report to the United Nations (UN) and be reviewed on what it has achieved.  A committee of independent experts, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (the Committee) does this review.

People with disability, through their representative organisations, can also provide a report to help the Committee review Australia.  This report is known as a civil society Shadow Report.

Australia was first reviewed by the Committee in September 2013.  A civil society Shadow Report was provided to the Committee. FPDN contributed to this report and representatives from FPDN went with a civil society delegation to the United Nations in Geneva to present to the committee. This 2013 report, Disability Rights Now, is available here.

In September 2019, Australia will be reviewed by the Committee for the second time. The Australian Government has provided its report to the Committee.  This report is the government’s response to a List of Issues that the Committee want to know about.

A civil society working group made up of Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs), disability representative and advocacy organisations is now working on the second civil society Shadow Report. You can find out more about the working group here.

About the Survey 

This survey is an opportunity for you, as a person with disability, to give feedback about your rights. The survey asks questions about different areas of your life.

You can choose to fill in the whole survey (15 sections), or you can pick the sections that are important to you. You can fill in as many questions as you want.

We do not ask for your name, but we do ask a bit of information about you, like your age and where you live.

The answers you give will help us write the report to the United Nations (UN) Committee about how well the Australian Government is implementing the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)

The survey will close on May 31, 2019. Click here to go to the survey.