Mr President,
Excellencies,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Rehabilitation International is a global organization advocating for rehabilitation, inclusion and human rights for persons with disabilities. Due to our understand-ing, Rehabilitation is a strategy addressing to individuals in need and aiming at empowerment of persons with disabilities to achieve optimal functioning in inter-action with the environment. Inclusion is a societal approach to facilitate full inte-gration in all aspects of life. Both strategies are complementary and its realization is a human rights obligation.
Despite significant progress in inclusion of people with disabilities since the adop-tion of the CRPD, Rehabilitation International is concerned about recent political and societal trends to down-prioritize or even deny the obligation to work towards full inclusion of persons with disabilities.
And we are even more concerned that the rights of people with disabilities and the obligation to protect vulnerable groups of people in war zones is disrupted in many cases in ongoing conflicts. The international community should take action to stop this significant violation of human rights and of international law principles immediately.
The implementation of the UN-CRPD is far from being completed. In this situation it is important to understand the complexity of areas of action and the strong in-teraction of different sectors. Just one example. To fight against poverty of persons
with disabilities, it is crucial to make schools accessible for children with disabili-ties and to implement inclusive schooling. This process must be continued in pro-fessional training at universities and other educational institutions. And even this will not be successful if we do not make sure that persons with disabilities have the chance to fully participate in the first labor market equally to others. But, if we achieve this, not only poverty of individuals will be reduced but the whole society will profit from full inclusion of persons with disabilities.
This is just one example. The case also could be made for access to health and rehabilitation services, inclusion into sports and cultural activities, access to infor-mation system and justice as well as the use of assistive technology, information technology and artificial intelligence and many others.
Rehabilitation international is fully committed to work towards full implementa-tion of the UN-CRPD. Let is work together, UN member states and non-state actors and other stakeholders in the field.
New York City, June 9, 2025
Signed on behalf of Rehabilitation International
Prof. Christoph Gutenbrunner, MD, PhD, FRCP, SFEBPRM
President of Rehabilitation International
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