Overview
Our government continues to view persons with disability through the lens of charity or medical treatment, often applying an attitude of “care, love, service” to address related issues. This fails to realize the meaning of “enabling persons with disability to enjoy the same foundation for rights as other people” under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (hereinafter “CRPD”). Not only is the government unable to advance policies that promote equal rights, but also ignores the participation of persons with disability in the policy process.
Official recognition of persons with disability is restricted to individuals with persons with a disability guide, which forms the basis all national statistical data in the national report. According to this definition, the proportion of disabled males stands at 5.62% of the total male population, and women with disabilities account for 4.27% of the total female population. This is far lower than the global average which stands at around 10%.
According to the Act to Implement the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability, (hereafter the “CRPD Implementation Act”), the government is responsible for screening and comparing existing laws and executive orders with the CRPD. However, as most government departments still lack comprehension and training concerning the issues, the required screening and monitoring work stipulated under the Implementation Act has not been implemented effectively.
Not only the central government lacks a comprehensive understanding of the CRPD principles, government authorities at the local level have even less understanding and awareness of the content of CRPD. This results in local laws and regulations, special laws, or administrative regulations enacted by local governments or departments (such as prison) have a very high risk of violating the provisions in the CRPD and the domestic People with Disabilities Rights Protection Act (“the Rights Act”) without even being aware of it.
The government's understanding on accessibility is limited to the physical environment. The barrier-free accessibility policy on existing buildings only cover some specifically nominated buildings and not all existing government buildings.
The overall resources (including policy formation, financial and resource allocation) provided by the government are insufficient, leading to difficulties in removing existing obstacles in society, and people with disabilities are often unable to obtain sufficient support. In 2016, for example, the government allocated TWD4,671 billion for social welfare expenditure and TWD13.3 billion for the persons with disabilities, accounting for only 0.66% of the total government budget for the year. According to the survey in 2013, there were 7,575 social workers in the country, of whom only 1,230 specialized in working with persons with mental and physical disabilities.
The government does not provide a holistic support assessment centered on the persons with disabilities. It only passively accepts individual requests for personal services from the Persons with Disabilities, thereby fragmenting the services provided, making it difficult to meet the needs of Persons with Disabilities.
The government has not yet recognized the importance of reasonable adjustment in the implementation of the rights of Persons with Disabilities, nor does it require employers or service providers the obligation to provide reasonable adjustment.
Many of the relevant laws, including the Rights Act, can be seen only as an aspirational declaration and not enforceable, lacking concrete implementation and monitoring mechanism. For example, the lack of enforcement rules, unclear in justiciability, high entry barrier and costs for appeals / litigation, lack of penalties, etc. Officials who deal with appeals often take a mediation manner and conciliatory approach, with little use of penalties.
Although the government has set up the Committee for the Promotion of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities under the Executive Yuan after the enactment of the Implementation Act, the work of the Committee has not been effective and the Committee is unable to work on issues across different government agencies. Similar limitation and inadequacy also impedes the work of similar Committees being set up by local governments.
Government have not implemented comprehensive assessment of their policies, laws and social services to determine their impact on people with disabilities and to ensure their right to equal participation and have their specific needs addressed. We recommend the Government should carry out comprehensive Disability Impact Assessment in the early stages of policy-making and legislatively process.
Special challenges facing indigenous persons with disabilities
Indigenous peoples encounter many obstacles and hardships due their racial status in society. Indigenous persons with disabilities often encounter even more inconveniences in daily life, barriers at work, and discrimination against their mental or physical disabilities, as well as their Indigenous origin. All these intersectional factors lead to discrimination against Indigenous persons with disabilities on multiple fronts, and this is even worse for Indigenous women with disabilities. There is an urgent need to establish a protection scheme specifically addressing the situation and the need of Indigenous persons with disabilities, further strengthening their basic rights, including social, civil, education and employment rights.
The government agencies that are directly mandated with addressing the issue of Indigenous persons with disabilities should be the Ministry of Health and Welfare and Council of Indigenous Peoples. However, these two agencies have not set up a specific unit or allocate staff member in charge of Indigenous persons with disabilities. Furthermore, The State Report does not specifically address the current situation of Indigenous persons with disabilities. This reveals that the national policies and system do not take into consideration the specific needs of Indigenous persons with disabilities. In addition, there is no representative from the Council of Indigenous Peoples or non-government Indigenous Peoples organizations included as members in the Committee on the Protection of Rights of Persons with Disabilities set up by the Social and Family Affairs Administration, Ministry of Health and Welfare (See Paragraph 10 of the State Report). The challenges and specific needs of Indigenous persons with disabilities could not be reflected and discussed in such Committee.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare only started to collect relevant statistical data on Indigenous persons with disabilities in 2014. Comparing Indigenous statistics with the national data, it shows that the proportion of Indigenous persons with physical disabilities and mental disabilities is higher than national proportion while the proportion of Indigenous persons with chronic psychosis is lower than national proportion. However, the numbers collected are submitted by the local governments based on the number of disability cards or other certified documentations issued. There is no way to verify the accuracy of these numbers. There is also the need for further research and investigation on the gap of the classification of disabilities between the Indigenous and national proportion to clarify if the gap is caused by Indigenous Peoples’ particularities in terms of cultural, economic, political and social perspectives.
The causes of Indigenous persons with disabilities should be addressed more. factors might include physical disabilities caused by being exposed to high risk working environments, or mental disabilities caused by difficulties in social adjustment and historical colonizations. Indigenous persons with disabilities living in urban or rural areas should receive the same level of protection. Indigenous persons with disabilities living in urban areas are particularly vulnerable to the feeling of loneliness and insecurities, having left their existing social network and support in their hometown and facing the daily pressure of livelihood. Indigenous persons also experience many challenges integrating into mainstream society due to loss of their traditional land and the fast pace of societal modernizations. This significantly increases the rate of education dropout, unemployment, alcoholism, and suicide compare to the general population. However, current psychological counselling and physical and mental health branches of government have no strategies in place to provide the assistance needed to address these specific challenges facing the indigenous people. National policies and frameworks on indigenous people also ignores the specific psychological need of the group, therefore failing to provide adequate systematic protection.
The government framework in determining and assessing physical and mental disabilities do not take into account of specific culture and language differences between indigenous people and the general population. Key indicators of learning assessment should take into account the student’s own unique cultural and societal backgrounds. In 2013, the government passed Regulation on the Method of Assessing and Determining Students with Physical and Mental Disorders and Gifted Students. Article 10 of the Regulation provides that in the process of assessing a child’s learning disability, one should exclude influencing environmental factors such as insufficient cultural stimulation and inappropriate teaching methods. However, according to the Ministry of Education’s Special Education Transmit Net, the number of indigenous students with special needs is higher than non-indigenous students. Many indigenous students are assessed to have learning difficulties, developmental disabilities and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) by the assessing authorities purely because of their different structural upbringing within their families. For example, an indigenous student may lack Chinese language skills because they were brought up by their grandparents speaking their native languages, this can also influence their world view being more aligned to that of their local community than the views shaped by mainstream education. In addition, the severe shortage of special need educators with indigenous specializations means many indigenous students are labeled with learning difficulties by mainstream teachers, causing further harm to the students. We strongly recommend that the identification and assessment process of indigenous students with special needs should involves parents, regular and special need teachers to minimize cultural and societal bias during the process.