RADAR: Our Human Rights Story

Our ambitions are to empower people experiencing ill health, injury or disability, through giving them choice and control over their lives, eliminating disability, poverty, and getting more disabled people into leadership positions so that they can bring about change from within organisations. These ambitions are grounded into the values of the Human Rights Act: freedom, respect, equality, dignity and autonomy.

The Human Rights Act goes where the Disability Discrimination Act cannot reach. It goes beyond providing equal access to services – it is about changing the nature of the service and how that change is made.

We have already seen successes through the Human Rights Act. For example the right to freedom of inhumane treatment and right to family life prevented two disabled sisters in East Sussex from being moved out of their parental house into residential care because the local authority had issued a blanket ban on care staff to lift adults on their own. [BIHR: link to individual case study section]

The power of the Human Rights Act needs to be further harnessed as disabled people in the UK still experience human rights violations on a day-to-day basis. Countless disabled people are not confident to stay in their home or go out without fear for their safety and security. Many disabled people are subject to actions and decisions that undermine their dignity in their daily lives, and disabled asylum seekers and refugees do not experience fair treatment where their needs are taken into account.The UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities shows what human rights mean to disabled people on the ground. For example, it states unequivocally that disabled people have the right to live where they want and not be forced into a particular living arrangement, and to get the support they need to participate in the community. Although the UN Disability Convention –signed and ratified by the UK Government in 2009 – does not have direct force in law, it provides a powerful interpretation of what the Human Rights Act can and should do for disabled people.

About RADAR

RADAR is the UK's largest disability campaigning organisation, with a membership of over 900 disability organisations and individual campaigners. Our vision is a just and equal society whose strength is human difference. Our mission is to enable individuals, networks and policy-makers to do things differently.

Visit Radar's website.

Website: 

http://www.radar.org.uk/