European Communities (Definition of Treaties) (United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) Order 2009

I did not rise to speak before the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, but I was expecting the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, to come back into the debate. I apologise for perhaps missing my cue. As I sense that we are pressed for time and coming towards the end of the debate, I will cut short my remarks. I shall cut to the chase and make a few remarks about a couple of the proposed reservations. I welcome the JCHR report. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has iconic significance for disabled people as providing important validation and underpinning of their rights, which have provided such a potent focus for campaigning by disabled people in recent years for improvements in their situation. The role of the UK and the process leading to the adoption of the convention has been widely welcomed, but the ratification process has become somewhat contentious as soon as it was learnt that there was some possibility that ratification might be attended by the entering of reservations. I can understand that concern as the JCHR report says that, ""scrutiny of the reservation and interpretative declaration proposed for this Convention"," should proceed, ""from the standpoint that there should be as few such statements as possible, preferably none, and that where such statements are necessary, the Government should be committed to making the legislative and other changes necessary to enable them to be withdrawn as soon as practicable"." However, I have never thought that the call for ratification without reservation, irrespective of any consideration of what these reservations might be, was very credible. With the JCHR, I would say that the Government’s view that the UK should not accede to any treaty unless domestic law and practice are capable of complying with its obligations is clearly right. I therefore welcome the balanced approach adopted by the JCHR and the Equality and Human Rights Commission in accepting the necessity for some of the reservations, but subject to review, with the aim of getting rid of them at the earliest possible date. I shall cut to the brief remarks I want to make about two of the proposed reservations. The first is on education. There seems to be some confusion here. The Joint Committee states that it welcomes the restatement in the Explanatory Memorandum of the Government’s commitment to inclusive education, but that, ""we are concerned, however, that the scope of the reservation and the interpretative declaration may send a confused message to people with disabilities about the purpose and intention of the Government’s position … We also ask the Government to confirm that the purpose of its proposed reservation and interpretative declaration is simply to clarify that nothing in the convention requires the Government to work towards the eventual elimination of special schools in the UK. If this is the purpose of the ""Government’s reservation and interpretative declaration, we accept that a lack of clarity in the convention may necessitate a reservation and an interpretative declaration which is compatible with the object and purpose of the convention"." If one wants to argue for no reservation on the ground that the convention is intended to be progressive, one can hardly object to the Government reiterating that nothing in the convention requires the eventual elimination of special schools. However, the concern here is not with the maintenance of specialist provision, but with the Government being explicit about it in their reservation and interpretative declaration. The JCHR points out that Germany has ratified without reservation, although its system of specialist education is overwhelmingly based on specialist provision. This is surely disingenuous, and the UK is only being straightforward and above board in being explicit about its position—another case, perhaps, of the UK signing up to international obligations only on a basis that it is able to go along with, in contrast to the oft-observed tendency of others to sign up to obligations that they are largely content to ignore. The noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, was also at pains to make this point. There is a continuing need for specialist provision. The disability community is divided about it. For example, the blind, the deaf and the deaf-blind had a major struggle in the negotiations leading to the convention to gain recognition at Article 24(3)(c) of the need to maintain specialist provision to meet their particular needs. Having achieved that, it seems only logical for the Government, in ratifying the convention, to make it clear that the UK’s education system includes specialist provision to meet highly specialised needs. I turn finally to the reservation concerning service in the Armed Forces. The argument that bans all disabled people from serving in the forces on the basis that people in wheelchairs, or people who are totally blind for that matter, could not possibly go into action, which they could not, is based on a very narrow and outdated stereotype of what disability is, and is certainly not one which is recognised by the DDA. There, disability includes things such as severe disfigurement, diabetes, controlled epilepsy, a history of mental illness and many more conditions, none of which would disable a person from active service in the Armed Forces. All we are talking about here is a right not to be automatically excluded from serving in the forces, not an automatic right to serve. No one is saying that any disabled person can perform any role in the services. All that disabled people want is the right not to be subjected to a blanket ban which says that the one thing a disabled person cannot be allowed to do is fight for his country. The matter came up—this is my final point—on the Disability Rights Task Force, which sat towards the end of the 1990s and brought forward the recommendations that led to the setting up of the Disability Rights Commission, on which I had the honour to serve with the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell. The task force was nothing if not reasonable on this question. We acknowledged the defence chiefs’ concerns about being sued by disabled people claiming to do things that were unreasonable. However, the Act gives disabled people rights only to do things that are reasonable. We suggested that a code of practice should be drawn up to regulate what was reasonable in return for removing the blanket ban. I am sorry to say that this suggestion was never followed up. However, I tentatively put it forward again as a basis on which the Government could feel safe in removing the blanket ban on bringing service in the Armed Forces within the scope of the DDA during the passage of the Equality Bill.