By Matthew Russell Lee
www.innercitypress.com/usun1disabilities073009.html
UNITED NATIONS, July 30 -- Accompanied by William Kennedy Smith and Barack Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice signed on to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on July 30. The UN's 38th floor conference room was packed, journalists on one side, disability right advocates on the other. Ambassador Rice took a question from the press corps, relating this signing to the U.S. joining the UN Human Rights Council.
One wanted to ask, will the U.S. be joining the International Criminal Court? But time did not permit.
When the Convention was enacted in 2006, without the support of the Bush administration, the chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Convention Don MacKay told Inner City Press that arguments that a reference to reproductive health meant abortion rights has no merit at all. Click here for video, here for Inner City Press' story at the time.
Given Thursday's signing, one might expect the Obama administration to move toward joining the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, regarding which as Inner City Press recently asked, similar abortion-related arguments have been made. But that is for another day.
The pen that Ambassador Rice used to sign the disabilities convention was handed to William Kennedy Smith. He took additional questions from the media. Inner City Press asked about his comment that the World Bank had to spend million retrofitting infrastructure it helped build after Hurricane Mitch, because accessibility for the disabled had not been considered. "I got this from James Wolfensohn," he told Inner City Press. He might have added that similar inaccessible building with U.S. foreign aid took place in Kosovo, among other places.
Then a UN staffer asked William Kennedy Smith for the pen. He offered to buy her a new one, saying that this pen was symbolic. The UN staffer responded that everyone asks for the pen, but the UN uses the same pen for all signings. As Inner City Press videotaped the discussion, quickly dubbed Pen-Gate, a US Mission spokesman stepped in to try to defuse it.
On the elevator down from the 38th floor, the head of the UN Office of Legal Affairs Patricia O'Brien spoke about her office's upcoming move out of the UN's building, as part of the Capital Master Plan renovation. She was told about Pen-Gate, and remarked, "That's terrible." Then the elevator doors closed.
Afterwards, one correspondent who had been left out of thesigning due to a lack of space marveled that the US Mission was in charge of who got into the UN Deputy Secretary General's conference room. The UN made a point of controlling the pen that Ambassadors use to sign multilateral treaties, but cedes control over the Secretariat's space to Permanent Five members' press preferences (click here for France's Sarkozy example).
And see, www.innercitypress.com/usun1disabilities073009.html
