– As delivered –

Statement by H.E. Mrs. María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés, President of the 73rd Session of the UN General Assembly

17 April 2019

Your Excellency, Walton Alfonso Webson, Permanent Representative of Antigua and Barbuda to the UN,

Your Excellency, Park Chull-joo, Deputy Permanent Representative of the Republic of Korea to the UN,

Excellencies, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,

 

It is a great pleasure to be with you today. Let me start by thanking the Ambassadors Webson and Park for their tremendous support and commitment as Co-Chairs of this Steering Committee. And my warm appreciation goes, once again, to the Republic of Korea for serving as the host of our meetings. Thank you.

I am also grateful for the presence of so many distinguished colleagues – from missions, from the Secretariat and, crucially, from civil society organizations that represent persons with disabilities. It is encouraging to see that we are – finally – giving accessibility the attention it deserves.

Dear friends,

As you all know, empowering persons with disabilities is one of my seven priorities for this session of the General Assembly. To support this objective, my team – in consultation with stakeholders – distilled this broad priority into three guiding principles and workstreams:

  • First, pursuing a Disability-Inclusive Approach to Development and ensuring that disability is mainstreamed across the work of the UN. And I would like to praise again the Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs for the excellent DESA report on disability and development published last December.
  • Second, adopting a comprehensive and systematic approach to accessibility.
  • And third, aligning our work with the institutional review conducted by the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, which has now produced a draft UN Disability Inclusion Strategy.

The work of this Steering Committee is crucial … because we, at the United Nations, must lead by example on inclusion and accessibility, and we have been lagging behind.

María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés

President of the UN General Assembly

The work of this Steering Committee is crucial to all three work-streams – because we, at the United Nations, must lead by example on inclusion and accessibility, and we have been lagging behind.

So I hope that today we can make further progress on identifying measures to improve accessibility. This Committee’s recommendations will be presented at the High-Level Luncheon I will convene on 12 June, during the CPRD Conference of States Parties – which is now less than two months away.

And I hope that we can work together on increasing the reach of the Convention on the Rights of the Persons with Disabilities. 177 Member States are already party to the Convention – we should now be focused on universal ratification. In February, I wrote to Member States that remain outside the treaty, encouraging them to ratify or accede. I have also been conducting informal bilateral conversations to advance this goal.

Excellencies,

Once again, I thank you for your support. I look forward to hearing the status report of the Co-Chairs and your views on recommendations to be presented in June.

Thank you