Disability Rights Are Human Rights: Pushing Ethiopia towards a Rights-Based Movement
![handle is hein.journals/jihr19 and id is 52 raw text is: Copyright 2020 by Sirak Akalu Iyassu & Fiona McKinnon Volume 19, Number 1 (2020)
Northwestern Journal of Human Rights
DISABILITY RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS:
PUSHING ETHIOPIA TOWARDS A RIGHTS-
BASED MOVEMENT
Sirak Akalu Iyassu & Fiona McKinnon
ABSTRACT-Official estimates suggest that 95 percent of Ethiopia's
disabled live under the poverty line and are unemployed.1 To get by, many
must beg or depend on family and friends. The Ministry of Labor and Social
Affairs, the ministry responsible for enforcing rights of disabled people, is a
paper tiger, toothless at that. Recent data suggest that only one percent of
Ethiopian buildings and roads are fully accessible to the disabled.2 Yet
accessibility is not only a physical, but also a social, cultural, and political
sine qua non-and so a matter of human rights.
Rights of Ethiopia's disabled have been quashed or ignored for
millennia. Generations have grown up in a society shaped by church dogma,
which construes disability as the result of sin, a source of shame. Whether
disability is physical or cognitive, regardless of an affected person's courage
and capacity to cope, the disabled have been excluded from many aspects of
' INT'L LABOR ORG., MOVING TOWARDS DISABILITY INCLUSION: STORIES OF CHANGE 14 (2015).
2 For the purpose of this paper, the term full access should be construed as incorporating reasonable
accommodations and universal building design standards set out in the CRPD (see CONVENTION ON THE
RIGHTS OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITY RATIFICATION PROCLAMATION art. 2, openedfor signature March
30, 2007, 2515 U.N.T.S. 3, 73-74 (entered into force May 3, 2008) (Eth.) [hereinafter CRPD]). In
Ethiopia, people with disabilities face great challenges because of lack of accessible infrastructure. In his
2012 thesis, Amare Sisay mentions an instance where a wheelchair user was asked to go to Piassa, one
of the busiest neighborhoods in the capital city, to get his photo taken for a National Identity Card. This
person went to 12 photo shops but could not obtain the service he needed because he could not enter any
of the establishments due to the fact that there were stairs and narrow doorways. Amare Sisay, Towards
Ensuring Accessibility Right to the Built Environment for Persons with Disabilities in Ethiopia: The Case
of Addis Ababa (June 2012) (LL.M thesis, Ethiopian Civil Service University).
Data on accessibility is extremely limited in Ethiopia, and indeed across Africa. For this article, an
unpublished survey conducted by the US-based organization Self-Determinator was used as an input to
determine the full accessibility of schools, workplaces, shopping centers, government offices and hotels.
The survey was sent to 20 volunteers with physical disabilities residing in different parts of the country
and focused on the volunteers' day-to-day activities. The participants were given the ADA checklist for
existing facilities (available at htps://www.adacheklist.org/doe/fullchecklist/ada-checklist.pdf) and an
additional questionnaire containing the international design of accessibility, and they were asked to rate
the accessibility of their housing, work place, place of worship, transportation, school, parks, roads, hotels
and cafes, and parking spots. For the purposes of this article, the average results of the data for the four
categories explained above were used to determine the percentage of buildings and roads in Ethiopia that
are accessible to people with disabilities.
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Disability Rights Are Human Rights: Pushing Ethiopia towards a Rights-Based Movement
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