I am contributing this piece very much as a “sounding board” in the hope there will follow some advice, information and guidance forthcoming that I could pursue in advancing disability rights for those in the Solomon Islands.
Very much in mind today as I put pen to paper is the need for the National Referral Hospital to bring into use the modular building gifted to the NRH last September by the FSA that generously responded to an appeal I had made for such a facility to replace the previous and now demolished Rehabilitation Workshop that in earlier times had functioned to manufacture and custom fit artificial limbs to those who had fallen victim to diabetes and had a leg removed.
Despite there now being several hundred former patients awaiting a prosthetic leg nothing is being done to give them help.
The NRH is understood unable to bring the modular building into service due, it has been claimed, because funds have all been set aside in the fight against the coronvirus threat.
There exists, since 2008, a Democratic Rights Fund (DRF) and its sister organization the Disability Rights Advocacy Fund (DRAF), and these two bodies have funded organizations of persons with disabilities across the developing world, including in the Pacific Islands – to participate in the ratification, implementation, and monitoring of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)
I was hoping the DRF could have been called on to provide the funds necessary to get the modular building installed and functional at the NRH, but grantmaking by way of funding seems to be wholly dependent on the Solomon Islands Government having ratified the CRPD, which, to-date it has not.
The CRPD resulted from decades of activity during which group rights standards developed from aspirations to binding treaties.
There are some 50 Articles to the Convention which are considered to be binding on the parties that have signed it.
I can well imagine the Solomon Islands Government having some difficulty in signing-up to some of the Articles, but could not the government sign up with a proviso or more, as the case of some foreign governments have done? As an example, El Salvador signed up to the Convention but only to the extent that it is compatible to its own constitution.
France, Japan, Malta, Mauritius, the Netherlands, Poland, Australia and the United Kingdom, all signed the Convention but have declared certain of the Articles to be interpreted according to domestic law.
I started off my claiming this piece to be merely a ‘sounding board’ but what is pretty clear to me is unless the Solomon Islands Government ratifies the CPRD there will be no finds forthcoming from the DRF or the CPRD and my hope is the SIG could, somehow, find the legal mechanism to sign-up to the CPRD as other nations have found the means of doing so.
Meanwhile, without a functioning Rehabilitation Workshop at the NRH, the number of amputees needing help keeps on growing week by week.
Yours sincerely
Frank Short
