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In March 2008, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) came into force.

New Zealand’s commitment to ensuring that refugees with a disability are not excluded from the country’s refugee resettlement quota is longstanding. In accepting Asian refugees from Uganda in 1973, Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk insisted that New Zealand’s refugee intake include a significant proportion of ‘handicapped’ (the terminology has since changed) cases. Reporting Mr Kirk’s announcement, the capital city’s Evening Post newspaper wrote: “New Zealand should not say it wants only ’the best apples in the barrel’.

Each year, the New Zealand government selects 750 refugees for resettlement. Assessment services and support for disability cases among these 750 have improved over the past few years, thanks to strong advocacy from Refugee Services (the primary agency helping refugees to settle within their new communities) and other specialist agencies such as CCS Disability Action. Quota refugees have six weeks of orientation, screening and assessment at the Mangere Reception Centre in Auckland before resettling throughout the country.

Mary, a 26-year old Zimbabwean refugee living in London, stands less than one and a half metres tall and walks with difficulty, a result of restricted growth due to a condition that makes her bones brittle and vulnerable to breaking. Each time she breaks a major bone she faces months in hospital. For this reason, she is terrified of stairs and other such challenges.

Full and effective participation in society by people with disabilities implies the obligation to provide them with specific protection. EU Directive 2003/9 specifies that national legislation must take into account the specific situation of vulnerable people, such as those with disabilities, with regard to material reception conditions. In all cases, their specific needs should be individually assessed. This means that EU Member States should provide “medical or other necessary assistance” to asylum seekers with particular needs.

Historically, US refugee admissions policy hinged on the notion of ‘political persecution’ and was coloured by foreign policy interests. This bias was addressed to some extent by the introduction of a new system for determining refugee resettlement priorities in 1996, whereby priorities for refugee resettlement were revised to introduce greater diversity in the numbers and types of refugees to be resettled in the US.

On July 31, 2009, the United States finally joined 141 other countries in signing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the most comprehensive human rights treaty of the 21st century. Although most disability service agencies in the US theoretically include individuals of all ethnic, racial, cultural and linguistic backgrounds among their clients, few service providers are proactive in reaching out to refugee communities.

Yemen receives thousands of refugees and asylum seekers each year, due to its strategic location, and is the only country in the Arab Peninsula that is signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol. However, Yemen does not have national refugee legislation or an asylum policy or institution to deal with issues relating to refugees and other asylum-seeking populations in the country. Refugee and other asylum-related matters are mostly governed by different provisions of national laws.

The rationale for the reform of the UN humanitarian system was that, by clarifying the roles and responsibilities among UN agencies and by trying to enhance sectoral and cross-cutting coordination, the humanitarian response would be improved – providing better coordinated…