Can anything good come out of the United Nations? Actually, yes. Little noted in December, the General Assembly adopted a "Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities." If ratified by most member nations, the convention could strengthen protections for many people with disabilities.
This is no trivial matter. In many countries, people with disabilities face significant, sometimes life-threatening discrimination. According to a 1997 study published in the British medical journal Lancet, about 8 percent of all infants who die each year in the Netherlands are euthanized by physicians due to severe illness or disability. North Korea has been accused by defectors of killing disabled newborns, a charge made all the more credible by New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof's assertion in 2003 that North Korea "systematically" exiles "mentally retarded and disabled people from the capital, so as not to mar its beauty." The People's Republic of China has legalized certain eugenics policies, while here in the United States, disability-rights activists complain that disabled patients face medical discrimination, such as being pressured into signing do-not-resuscitate orders when they enter the hospital with non-life-threatening conditions.
Of course, it wouldn't be an official action of the United Nations without containing an element of the surreal. Even though the convention focuses on the rights and intrinsic value of people with disabilities, because of the sausage-making process that epitomizes U.N. negotiations, the term "disability" is never defined. "There were two competing approaches to defining disability," Susan Yoshihara told me. Yoshihara is the executive vice president of
the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), a conservative nongovernmental organization that participated in the negotiations. "Many representatives wanted an objective medical definition. But a few insisted upon a subjective social definition, which would have based disability on attitudinal barriers that some might face." Unable to reach consensus on the meaning of disability, the U.N. adopted a treaty that does not identify the people it intends to protect.
Still, the convention is a welcome reaffirmation of the principles that are "proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations which recognize the inherent dignity and worth and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family." In a world growing increasingly utilitarian, an international declaration unequivocally affirming that human life has intrinsic moral worth regardless of capacities and attributes is most welcome.
Toward this noble end, Article 10 of the convention reaffirms that "every human being has the inherent right to life" and, in principal, requires signatory countries to "take all necessary measures to ensure its effective enjoyment by persons with disabilities on an equal basis with others." This could be very good news for Dutch infants born with serious health problems or disabilities, as the Dutch parliament is well on the path to formally legalizing eugenic infanticide. If the Low Countries ratify the treaty, as expected, Dutch diplomatic representatives should be asked to justify their "compassionate" policy of allowing the killing of disabled babies in the face of this new international convention requiring the lives of disabled people be protected.
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