By Christabel Addo/Agnes Ansah-GNA
Accra, May 4, GNA - A two-day Disability Rights Community workshop organised by the University Of Ghana School Of Law opened on Wednesday to galvanize stakeholder support to revive issues on disability, which has currently taken a low dive nationally.
Dr Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua, a Senior Lecturer at the School of Law, College of Humanities, University of Ghana, said it had been ten years since the Disability Act came into being, and there was the need to take a critical retrospect of what had been achieved and the gaps, order to address the identified challenges.
He said Ghana became the 119th country globally to ratify the Convention on Right of Persons with Disability (CRPD) and cited some of its provisions as equal rights and opportunities for Persons with Disabilities (PWD).
He said the CRPD made provisions including a call on countries to ensure that all public buildings were made disability friendly to make for easy access and effective participation of PWD. However, most of such infrastructure, especially those in tertiary institutions including the University of Ghana had remained unchanged.
There has since also being new developments with regards to changes in the CRPD on the international front, and Ghana being a state Party to the Convention must not fail to address the discriminations to PWD within its Laws.
Dr Appiagyei-Atua said there were also special categories such as the Affirmation, Reformulation, Extension and the Innovation Rights, that confirmed and re-emphasised the right of PWD to certain special provisions and remove social barriers that prevented these persons from functioning effectively.
He cited some of these social barriers to PWD, as access to justice, saying the absence of qualified sign language interpreters at the courts prevented both prosecutors, judges and victims from effectively communicating, leading to poor judgements.
He said the School of Law College of Humanities of the University of Ghana had advanced plans to run a week course for stakeholders on disability management to boost their knowledge and skills, also introduce a course in Disability Law, as well as effectively engage PWD students on the campus to address their challenges.
He said it was important that government made sustained annual financial allocations to improving issues on disability in areas including education, infrastructure for friendly use by PWD and improving enforcement of existing legislations, as well as enacting new ones to address identified gaps.
The workshop, however became a near- flop as all the key resource persons made up of the Ministry of Gender Children and Social Protection, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Employment, Social Welfare and State Enterprises Committee, and the President of the National Council of Persons with Disability failed to show up at the opening ceremony.
The programme, which was originally scheduled to start at 0830hours, had to commence after 1000 hours as the organisers continued to make fruitless telephone calls in an attempt to reach the resource persons, all to no avail.
The resource persons were expected to give their perspectives on the progress made so far in the implementation of the CRPD and other related legislations and the prospects in achieving access and the integration of these laws into mainstream social cycles.
Dr Appiagyei-Atua, expressed his disappointment at the turn of events, and hoped that society would exhibit more positive attitude towards issues concerning disability.
GNA
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