RI Global: Office of Communications
Contact: Adrian Brune, +1 347-759-9501
RI President Jan Monsbakken and Secretary General Venus Ilagan met with Ms. Akiko Ito, Chief of the Secretariat for the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD), to identify and discuss possible areas of collaboration between her office and RI to help further promote the rights of persons with disabilities worldwide. Ms. Ito informed Mr. Monsbakken and Ms. Ilagan that UN DESA will initiate more solid advances to promote accessibility by making it central in everything DESA does in 2016. She has asked for RI’s support in bringing in more stakeholders and in engaging those who can make cities across the word more accessible and inclusive of persons with disabilities.
Mr. Monsbakken assured Ms. Ito of RI’s commitment to help advance UN DESA’s work on accessibility particularly through RI’s International Commission on Technology and Accessibility (ICTA), the organization’s thematic working group on technology and accessibility. RI, which is a global network of experts including persons with disabilities themselves, has decades of work to promote access in its various dimensions, at all levels. ICTA has worked with a number of governments for the conduct of accessibility studies and in coming up with specific sets of recommendations on how to ensure access in all infrastructures funded by governments. ICTA has provided such partnership with the Governments of Qatar and Kuwait, among others.
RI Global: Founded in 1922, Rehabilitation International (RI Global) is a worldwide network promoting the rights and inclusions of persons with disabilities (PwDs) through advocacy, habilitation and rehabilitation to achieve an inclusive world in which all people can enjoy full human rights.
Join us at the 2016 RI Global World Congress: riworldcongress.com
