The United Nations scheduled an upcoming disability rights vote on a day when the United States and Israel wouldn’t be there in an effort to get it approved.
“With a long history of being the only two countries to vote against some of the most uncontroversial human rights measures, we don’t really see the point in including them in treaties. We know they’ll take it as license to do the exact opposite of what the treaty says,” explained one anonymous U.N. spokesperson.
The U.S. and Israeli response to U.N. disability efforts has been consistent with this characterization. The U.S. signed but has not ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. Formal U.S. ratification fell six votes short in a Senate vote in in 2012, making it non-binding in the country.
“It’s pretty ironic,” explained disability advocate Sara Santos. “Republicans found some ham-fisted way to make it about the sovereignty of municipal and state disability law, a concept they’d spent decades dedicated to eroding.”
Israel signed and formally ratified the CRPD, but their understanding of the scope of the treaty is hotly contested. Problematically, most U.N. member states recognize a State of Palestine. Moreover, past U.N. investigations highlight willful IDF targeting of Palestinians with disabilities, and in its most recent escalation of genocide in Gaza, Israel has created the largest population of child amputees in modern history.
Said an Israeli U.N. representative, “Show me where in the Convention it prohibits a nation’s right to amputate potential future Holocaust perpetrators.”
It is assumed by U.N. expert analysts that nobody drafting the CRPD anticipated this degree of sheer derangement to make that language necessary.
U.N. delegates hoping to pass the vote intend to bring jumbo foam fingers with them to celebrate, to emphasize their fierce condemnation of their colleagues in Washington, D.C. and Jerusalem — who will probably disregard them entirely.