Ministry Statements & Speeches:
Mr President,
New Zealand thanks and congratulates Ms Heba Hagrass on her inaugural report to the Council. We greatly appreciate the work of the previous mandate holders Mr Gerard Quinn and Ms Catalina Devandas Aguilar, who have made valuable contributions to promoting and advancing the rights of persons with disabilities, and New Zealand looks forward to progressing this work further with Special Rapporteur Hagrass.
New Zealand is proud to have also played a part in advancing the rights of persons with disabilities over the past ten years, including through co-leading resolutions on disabilities with Mexico, both here in the Human Rights Council and at the General Assembly’s Third Committee.
We take our commitments to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities seriously. Practical demonstrations of this commitment include our whole-of-Government implementation response to our review by the Committee in 2022 and co-chairing the Group of Friends of the CRPD here in Geneva and of Persons with Disabilities in New York.
We welcome the thematic focus of the Special Rapporteur on inclusive care and support systems. New Zealand is seeking to strengthen practices in this area domestically, through the transformation of our Disability Support System.
New Zealand strongly supports the work of this mandate to strengthen system-wide accessibility, inclusion and mainstreaming of the rights of persons with disabilities. We would welcome the Special Rapporteur’s views on how we can further improve disability inclusion at the UN, including in our work at the Human Rights Council?
I thank you.