(a) urgently reconsider the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment
Act and in particular repeal those sections that limit further legal action and
limit the circumstances in which family members can be paid and the categories
of family member that can be paid;
(b) ensures that effective domestic remedies are available for breaches of all those
rights as set out in the international conventions and covenants to which New
Zealand is a state party; and
(c) advise the HRC of the concrete steps it has taken to address the systemic abuse
of the health of people with intellectual disability since 2009.
Implementation and Monitoring
33. In 2010, reflecting its commitment to the CRPD, the Government recognised the Human
Rights Commission, the Office of the Ombudsman, and the Convention Coalitionxxxiv as
an independent monitoring mechanism of New Zealand’s implementation of the CRPD.
34. The inclusion of a requirement in the CRPD to establish a monitoring body including
government officials, members of civil society and national human rights institutions
represents international best practice. Although earlier covenants and conventions do not
specifically require such a mechanism, establishing equivalent mechanisms in relation to
those covenants and conventions would provide a robust framework to systematically
monitor other international instruments to which New Zealand is a state party.
35. The Commission recommends that the Government:
(a) establish mechanisms, drawing on the CRPD model, to independently monitor
the Government’s implementation of each of the human rights treaties to which
it is a state party; and
(b) commit to implementing any recommendations from these mechanisms.
36. In the area of human rights measurement, there remains a distinct lack of data across a
number of key indicators. Where data is available, it is often not sufficiently
disaggregated to be of use in monitoring the realisation of human rights. For example,
Report Card 11, the latest in the series from UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre notes
that data for New Zealand is available for less than 75% of the total number of indicators
used.
37. A number of United Nations treaty bodies have therefore called for the gathering of
systematic, rigorous and robust national human rights data for groups including disabled
people, women and sexual and gender minorities. This will have the impact of better
informing human rights interventions and highlight gaps for improvement in human
rights realisation.
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