Day: September 10, 2022

Seventy-seventh session

Item 69 (c) of the provisional agenda*

Promotion and protection of human rights: human rights

situations and reports of special rapporteurs and representatives

The Secretary-General has the honour to transmit to the General Assembly the report of the Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, Gerard Quinn, submitted in accordance with Human Rights Council resolution 44/10.

Summary

In the present report the Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, Gerard Quinn, examines the protection of the rights of persons with disabilities in the context of military operations. The report focuses on the implementation and application of obligations under international humanitarian law towards persons with disabilities during the conduct of hostilities.

I. Introduction

The present report is submitted by the Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, Gerard Quinn, to the General Assembly. It contains a thematic study on the protection of the rights of persons with disabilities in military operations.

In preparing the report, the Special Rapporteur engaged in extensive regional consultations (in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa). The Special Rapporteur would like to thank the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the International Disability Alliance and the Diakonia International Humanitarian Law Centre for coordinating and assisting in the facilitation of the regional consultations. These first-of-their-kind consultations, bringing together the military with disability civil society, proved highly instructive. They lay the groundwork for continued dialogue of this kind in the future.

As part of the development process for the report, the Special Rapporteur also analysed the responses to a questionnaire addressed to States, their militaries, national human rights institutions, specialized agencies of the United Nations, persons with disabilities and their representative organizations. The Special Rapporteur received a total of 22 written inputs and expresses his deep appreciation to all respondents for their insightful contributions and cooperative demeanour.

This report is the second in a three-part series on armed conflicts and disability. The first – presented in 2021 to the General Assembly – assessed the overall visibility of persons with disabilities along all points on the conflict/peace continuum, from conflict prevention to the conduct of hostilities, to evacuation and humanitarian relief, to peacekeeping and to peacebuilding (A/76/146). It found that persons with disabilities were relatively to absolutely invisible along all points on this continuum. To build on this foundation, the Special Rapporteur resolved to produce a more focused report on the implementation and application of obligations under international humanitarian law towards persons with disabilities during the conduct of hostilities.

The third and final thematic report in this series will be presented in 2023, and will focus on peacebuilding and disability, including accountability for past wrongs. It will round out the series by focusing on how to make more intentional space in peacebuilding processes for the voices of persons with disabilities, who have key insights into rebuilding broken societies and creating a more resilient and sustainable future for the benefit of all. These three reports may be seen as a focused and coherent contribution to larger debates in the United Nations system threading together peace and security with human rights, and particularly as they touch on the rights of persons with disabilities.

The purpose of this report is not to paint a picture of a more inclusive kind of warfare. Far from it. It is predicated on the essential illegality of all warfare under the Charter of the United Nations and aims at drastically reducing the lethality of armed conflict as experienced by one of the world’s largest minorities, persons with disabilities.

Source: UN General Assembly

Voice-operated smartphones are aiming at a vast yet widely overlooked market in sub-Saharan Africa — the tens of millions of people who face huge challenges in life because they cannot read or write.

In Ivory Coast, a so-called “Superphone” using a vocal assistant that responds to commands in a local language is being pitched to the large segment of the population — as many as 40 percent — who are illiterate.

Developed and assembled locally, the phone is designed to make everyday tasks more accessible, from understanding a document and checking a bank balance to communicating with government agencies.

“I’ve just bought this phone for my parents back home in the village, who don’t know how to read or write,” said Floride Jogbe, a young woman who was impressed by adverts on social media.

She believed the 60,000 CFA francs ($92) she forked out was money well spent.

The smartphone uses an operating system called “Kone” that is unique to the Cerco company, and covers 17 languages spoken in Ivory Coast, including Baoule, Bete, and Dioula, as well as 50 other African languages.

Cerco hopes to expand this to 1,000 languages, reaching half of the continent’s population, thanks to help from a network of 3,000 volunteers.

The goal is to address the “frustration” illiterate people feel with technology that requires them to be able to read or write or spell effectively, said Cerco president Alain Capo-Chichi, a Benin national.

“Various institutions set down the priority of making people literate before making technology available to them,” he told AFP.

“Our way skips reading and writing and goes straight to integrating people into economic and social life.”

Of the 750 million adults around the world who cannot read or write, 27 percent live south of the Sahara, according to UN figures for 2016, the latest year for which data is available.

The continent also hosts nearly 2,000 languages, some of which are spoken by tens of millions of people and are used for inter-ethnic communication, while others are dialects with a small geographical spread.

Lack of numbers or economic clout often means these languages are overlooked by developers who have already devised vocal assistants for languages in bigger markets.

Twi and Kiswahili

Other companies investing in the voice-operation field in Africa include Mobobi, which has created a Twi language voice assistant in Ghana called Abena AI, while Mozilla is working on an assistant in Kiswahili, which has an estimated 100 million speakers in East Africa.

Telecommunications expert Jean-Marie Akepo questioned whether voice operation needed the platform of a dedicated mobile phone.

Existing technology “manages to satisfy people”, he said.

“With the voice message services offered by WhatsApp, for example, a large part of the problem has already been solved.”

Instead of a new phone, he recommended “software with local languages that could be installed on any smartphone”.

The Ivorian phone is being produced at the ICT and Biotechnology Village in Grand-Bassam, a free-trade zone located near the Ivorian capital.

It came about through close collaboration with the government. The company pays no taxes or customs duties and the assembly plant has benefited from a subsidy of more than two billion CFA francs.

In exchange, Cerco is to pay 3.5 percent of its income to the state and train around 1,200 young people each year.

The company says it has received 200,000 orders since launch on July 21.

Thanks to a partnership with French telecommunications giant Orange, the phone will be distributed in 200 shops across Ivory Coast.

Source: Voice of America

Nigeria’s economy continued to be resilient, and maintains an upward trajectory, despite disruptions in the global economy, Nigerian President, Muhammadu Buhari said, yesterday.

Buhari, while inaugurating an 11-man Presidential Committee, on the National Economy in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, said, the loss of substantial volumes of oil, the mainstay of the economy, as well as, the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, had brought negative impacts on the economy of Africa’s most populous country.

“Starting with COVID-19, and now the conflict in Ukraine, the past three years have been turbulent ones for the global economy. Global interdependence has become more apparent as we had to deal with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity,” the Nigerian leader said.

He said, while the global economy was largely affected by challenges, which include lockdowns as COVID-19 raged – with disruptions to supply chains around the world and sharp fluctuations in prices, the Nigerian economy continued to show resilience and growth, despite the adverse effects of rising interest rates, a stronger U.S. dollar and higher inflation across the world.

Buhari charged the national economic committee to look inward in addressing the issues peculiar to Nigeria.

Last month, Nigeria, one of Africa’s largest oil producers, recorded a decline in the production of crude oil, with an estimation that the country produced less than one million barrels per day, Buhari said. This is a figure far less than the target of 1.88 million barrels per day, in the president’s 2022 national budget speech, in Oct, 2021.

He attributed the fall in oil production to be “essentially due to economic sabotage.”

The newly inaugurated economic committee, headed by Buhari, will, according to the president, bring together all policymakers responsible for the economy, to share a common understanding and approach towards solving the economic challenges in a swift and efficient manner.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK