20 Oct 2016

People with disability are a special constituency that needs the society’s attention to ensure that they are facilitated in critical areas such as access to justice and their rights.
Speaking at a disability rights seminar on access to justice for persons with disability in Botswana, Speaker of the National Assembly, Ms Gladys Kokorwe said it was in that respect that after consultation with all relevant stakeholders and institutions, the government revised the disability policy to address issues affecting people with disability.
Ms Kokorwe said the world was moving away from exclusion of people with disability in all spheres of life, political, economic, social or cultural, hence there was recognition of the need to mainstream disability as a cross cutting issue.
She said the much talked about social model calls for interventions to effectively address the special needs of people with disabilities in order to empower them so that they could lead independent lives and contribute to national prosperity.
“This is a departure from the old models which encouraged societies to see people with disability as charity cases with health conditions for which they should be assisted,” she said.
This, she added encouraged exclusion and marginalisation of people with disabilities from mainstream society and for people with disabilities this meant a life of dependence.
She noted that people with disabilities should be allowed to determine their needs and how those should be addressed. She encouraged the society to no longer view disability as inability but instead focus on ways to remove barriers that make easy to give excuses to exclude them.
Ms Kokorwe said the new approaches put more emphasis on the human rights of people with disabilities and that they should not be viewed as dependents.
She said government was in the process of consultation on the UN Convention on the rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRDP), and once the consultation was concluded, consideration would be made to ratify it.
Ms Kokorwe said upon acceptance of the revised policy on disabilities, government plans to work towards amending all policies and laws that might be discriminatory against people with disabilities.
The seminar was to address issues related to cases of discrimination against people with disability, raise awareness on disability rights and policies and the ratification of UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. ENDS