Participation of Persons with Disabilities in Sport, and Statistics and Data Collection

A/HRC/RES/49/12View PDF

Who created this mandate?

A Resolution of the Human Rights Council, under agenda item 3Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development, published in 2022.

What subjects does this mandate have?

9 topics

Accessibility Anti-Discrimination Measures Community Participation Data Collection Data Protection Human Rights Persons with Disabilities Sports Statistics

What does this mandate say?

56 operative paragraphs

Welcomes the fact that, to date, 184 States and one regional integration organization have ratified or acceded to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and that 100 States have ratified or acceded to the Optional Protocol to the Convention, and calls upon those States and regional integration organizations that have not yet ratified or acceded to the Convention and the Optional Protocol to consider doing so as a matter of priority;

Encourages States that have ratified the Convention and have submitted one or more reservations to it to initiate a process to review regularly the effect and continued relevance of such reservations, and to consider the possibility of withdrawing them;

Welcomes the reports of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on participation in physical activity and sport under article 30 of the Convention and on statistics and data collection under article 31 of the Convention, and calls upon all stakeholders to consider the findings and recommendations made in those studies with a view to implementing them, where appropriate;

Physical activity and sport

Calls upon all States to take appropriate measures to enable persons with disabilities to participate, on an equal basis with others and without discrimination, in recreational, leisure and sporting activities, applying an approach that is gender-responsive and age-sensitive, such as by:

Integrating physical activity into health policy objectives and taking a multidisciplinary and multisectoral approach to achieve those objectives through recreation and leisure, education and sport;

Adopting legislation and policies that enable persons with disabilities to engage in physical activity and sport on an equal basis with others, explicitly prohibiting discrimination based on disability, and providing a policy framework that creates incentives for the private sector to act and prevent discrimination;

Ensuring the meaningful and effective participation of persons with disabilities in public decision-making processes relevant to physical activity and sport, in particular by closely consulting with and actively involving persons with disabilities, including women and children with disabilities, through their representative organizations;

Ensuring access for persons with disabilities to mainstream recreation and leisure, physical education and sport and to disability-specific sports, including as participants, spectators or in any other role in sports events, without discrimination, in the public and private sectors;

Ensuring accessibility for persons with disabilities to all open spaces and public facilities, transport, paths, venues and related services, including by promoting universal design principles in new buildings and structures, and adequate and appropriate information and communications in accessible formats, including using sign languages, as participants, staff and spectators or in any other role of sports events;

Taking effective measures to ensure that persons with disabilities can organize and develop disability-specific sporting activities themselves, in addition to efforts made by mainstream sports organizations;

Developing awareness-raising programmes, including in accessible formats, about the importance of physical activity for persons with disabilities, including health and social inclusion outcomes, targeting family members and involving the media and other stakeholders;

Ensuring that children with disabilities have equal access with other children to participation in play, recreation and leisure and sporting activities, as well as physical education, both in the context of inclusive education and out of school, increasing teachers’ and educators’ capacity in this respect and hiring persons with disabilities as teachers;

Ensuring that education entities responsible for training teachers and educators on physical education and sport take effective measures to develop, include and strengthen disability-specific and disability-inclusive sports and practices in the curricula, including when addressing the workforce that supports extracurricular activities, and ensuring that persons with disabilities have equal opportunities to become teachers and educators on physical education and sport;

Implementing governance structures with appropriate and equitable funding distribution to provide equal opportunities, grants and awards for athletes with disabilities to develop their careers on an equal basis with others;

Identifying and promoting athletes with disabilities with potential in sports, without discrimination of any kind, so that they can, eventually, fully participate at all levels of local, national and international competition of their choice, including but not limited to Olympic and Paralympic competitions and the Special Olympics World Games;

Recognizing indigenous or traditional sports and supporting indigenous athletes with disabilities, including women and girls, in order to enable them to participate in leisure activities, including sport;

Conducting, promoting and funding research and data collection, analysis and use, systematizing existing administrative data and considering also community-driven and crowdsourced data collection, disaggregating by age, sex and disability, in order to assess, inter alia, the health outcomes of physical activity of persons with disabilities, the availability and affordability of assistive technology for physical activity and sport, the current participation of persons with disabilities in recreational, amateur and professional sports and the opportunities available and accessible to them;

Creating partnerships with the private sector, including sports organizations and the tourism, recreational, fitness and wellness industries, and building capacity to implement accessibility measures and to reduce the impact of attitudinal barriers;

Calls upon all States to take specific actions to counter disability-based structural exclusion and discrimination in recreational, leisure and sporting activities and to develop safeguards to prevent, monitor and act on violence and abuse in sports against persons with disabilities, especially women and girls with disabilities, children with disabilities and persons with intellectual disabilities, providing proper means to monitor sports activity, investigate and, as appropriate, prosecute perpetrators of crimes, provide redress for victims, adopt measures of non-repetition and ensure access to justice for persons with disabilities on an equal basis with others, and to promote education campaigns on violence and abuse prevention;

Encourages all relevant business enterprises, in particular business enterprises in the sport, tourism, recreational, fitness and wellness industries, to design more inclusive and affordable sports systems for persons with disabilities, including through artificial intelligence, to ensure access for persons with disabilities, on an equal basis with others, in mainstream settings, to develop specific capacities or skills among staff, and to recruit persons with disabilities within the workforce at all levels;

Encourages local, national and international organizations involved in sport, recreation, fitness and physical activities to commit to the full inclusion of persons with disabilities by developing internal policies on non-discrimination and disability inclusion, creating internal safeguarding systems to prevent and address violence against persons with disabilities, especially against women and girls with disabilities, and promoting opportunities for exchange among athletes, coaches and referees with disabilities and their peers without impairments, fostering camaraderie and a community of practice;

Statistics and data protection

Calls upon all States to take appropriate measures to ensure sustainable, comprehensive and inclusive data collection, analysis and use on persons with disabilities and on the barriers they face in exercising their rights, applying a human rights-based approach to data in order to formulate and implement policies, and monitor and assess the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, such as by:

Including questions identifying persons with disabilities in data collection, including in censuses and all household surveys, and ensuring that those questions incorporate a functional approach, such as that adopted by the Washington Group short set of questions;

Disaggregating by disability all individual- and household-level indicators;

Conducting regular disability-specific surveys to collect more detailed information, including qualitative information, on persons with disabilities and the environmental, attitudinal and institutional barriers they face;

Strengthening health information management systems to collect and report information by disability, which, when supported by qualitative data on environmental barriers, can be used to inform policy decisions, health planning, budgetary allocation and health emergency response efforts;

Systematizing their administrative data collection processes to collect data on disability and using the data to guide inclusive policy planning and to identify gaps in policy implementation that prevent the enjoyment of human rights by persons with disabilities;

Harmonizing disability-related data collection so that sets of data from different data tools can be consistent and used in conjunction with each other;

Considering, in data collection and analysis, the multiple, aggravated and intersecting forms of discrimination against persons with disabilities, particularly against women and girls, children and older persons with disabilities;

Supporting citizen-driven and community-based data collection processes and analyses led by or involving persons with disabilities and their representative organizations, recognizing persons with disabilities as experts in the barriers they face;

Selecting disability assessment tools that are fit for purpose and take into consideration the standards of accessibility, availability, acceptability and quality in the processes of determining eligibility for disability-related programmes;

Supporting quantitative and qualitative research aimed at evaluating existing policies, identifying policy gaps and guiding policy development by using inclusive research methodologies that meaningfully involve persons with disabilities as researchers and value their experiences as a source of knowledge;

Improving data-collection systems for adequate monitoring and evaluation on the implementation of the Convention and the Sustainable Development Goals for all persons with disabilities;

Also calls upon all States to involve persons with disabilities and their representative organizations at the different stages of data-collection processes, from strategic planning, identifying data needs and testing data collection methodologies to collecting, storing, analysing, disseminating and interpreting data, as well as in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of data-related policies;

Further calls upon all States to ensure that data being collected, stored, analysed, disseminated and interpreted on persons with disabilities and on the barriers they face are accessible to persons with disabilities in accessible formats, and that persons with disabilities can rectify incorrect or outdated information and can request the deletion of data unlawfully stored;

Calls upon all States to take appropriate measures to protect personal data and ensure confidentiality and respect for the privacy of persons with disabilities at all stages of data-collection processes, such as by:

Adopting or amending existing data protection laws to include persons with disabilities;

Using data privacy and data protection principles when developing disability-related policies or other policies that may affect them;

Ensuring that statistical confidentiality and data protection are enforced in data collection and data management for statistical purposes;

Ensuring that persons with disabilities provide their informed consent in accordance with the standards set out in the Convention, and that adequate and appropriate information is provided in accessible formats, including using sign languages, for obtaining informed consent;

Requiring greater transparency and accountability in respect of algorithms used in disability-related services and all other services that may affect them, and adopting a human rights-based approach to big data, including on persons with disabilities and their human rights;

Considering the enactment of legislation requiring human rights due diligence on big data collection, storage and sharing, as well as on artificial intelligence deployed by the public or private sector;

Requiring people and entities processing data on persons with disabilities, particularly health-related and rehabilitation data, to have internal supervisory mechanisms to avoid direct or indirect unauthorized disclosure of impairments;

Follow-up

Calls upon States to engage in international cooperation efforts at all levels aimed at enhancing their national capacities to enable persons with disabilities to participate on an equal basis with others in recreational, leisure and sporting activities, to ensure sustainable and comprehensive data collection regarding persons with disabilities, and to encourage the mobilization of public and private resources on a sustainable basis to mainstream the rights of persons with disabilities in development, and invites the Office of the High Commissioner and relevant United Nations agencies, and other donor mechanisms and partnerships, to consider ways to foster international cooperation activities in that regard, in close consultation with persons with disabilities and their representative organizations;

Encourages States to integrate in their reports to the high-level political forum on sustainable development the advances made with regard to the rights of persons with disabilities as reflected in laws, policies and practices developed relevant to the commitments under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and to develop human rights indicators and collect data disaggregated by age, sex and disability to inform those indicators using a functional approach, such as the Washington Group short set of questions, for disaggregation;

Calls upon States to ensure that all international cooperation is inclusive of persons with disabilities and does not contribute to creating new barriers for them;

Requests the Office of the High Commissioner to present an oral report to the Human Rights Council on the implementation of the United Nations Disability Inclusion Strategy across its programmes and operations at its fifty-third and fifty-sixth sessions, and also requests the Office to make its report to the Secretary-General on the Strategy publicly available in an easy-to-read version and in an accessible format;

Decides that its next annual interactive debate on the rights of persons with disabilities will be held at its fifty-second session, and will focus on support systems to ensure community inclusion of persons with disabilities, including as a means of building forward better after the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, and will have international sign interpretation and captioning;

Also decides to hold at its fifty-fifth session an interactive debate on the rights of persons with disabilities, which will focus on good practices of support systems enabling community inclusion of persons with disabilities, and will have international sign interpretation and captioning;

Requests the Office of the High Commissioner to prepare its next annual thematic study on the rights of persons with disabilities on support systems to ensure community inclusion of persons with disabilities, including as a means of building forward better after the COVID-19 pandemic, and to prepare its subsequent study on good practices of support systems enabling community inclusion of persons with disabilities, in consultation with States and other relevant stakeholders, regional organizations, the Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, civil society organizations, including organizations of persons with disabilities, and national human rights institutions, requiring contributions to be submitted in an accessible format, and requests that such stakeholder contributions, the studies themselves and an easy-to-read-version of them be made available on the website of the Office of the High Commissioner, in an accessible format, prior to the fifty-second and fifty-fifth sessions of the Human Rights Council;

Encourages the task force on secretariat services and accessibility for persons with disabilities to report orally to the Human Rights Council on its work and on the progress made in the implementation of its accessibility plan;

Urges States to consider further integrating and mainstreaming the perspective and rights of persons with disabilities into the work of the Human Rights Council;

Encourages representative organizations of persons with disabilities, civil society, national mechanisms as described in article 33 of the Convention, and national human rights institutions to participate actively in the debates referred to in paragraphs 16 and 17 above and in regular and special sessions of the Human Rights Council and its working groups;

Requests the Secretary-General, the High Commissioner and United Nations offices to continue to work collaboratively on the progressive implementation of standards and guidelines for the accessibility of facilities and services of the United Nations system, taking into account relevant provisions of the Convention, and underlines that the Human Rights Council, including its Internet resources, should be fully accessible to persons with disabilities;

Requests the Secretary-General to continue to ensure that the work of the Office of the High Commissioner with respect to the rights of persons with disabilities and the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities are adequately resourced for the fulfilment of their tasks;

Decides to remain seized of the matter.