Born at the Right Time

by Ron McCallum

  During the WBU conference I experienced somewhat of an awakening because, for the first time, I mixed with blind people from all over the world. I felt no desire to try to disguise or deny my lack of vision. I realised that my blindness was as central to my personhood as my male gender.

  There were many famous people in attendance, including the blind United Kingdom politician David Blunkett, who had served prominently in the Tony Blair Cabinet, including as Secretary of State for the Home Department. During his speech to the WBU General Assembly, David Blunkett told a marvellous story that I’m sure he won’t mind me repeating.

  One day at an important luncheon, he found himself seated next to the Queen. The dish put before him comprised several cutlets and vegetables. Certainly for me, small cutlets are difficult to deal with because they tend to slide around the plate, you need to spear them with a fork and then try to cut them. David was obviously having some difficulties, and so Her Majesty leaned across and asked, ‘Secretary of State, may I cut up the cutlets for you?’ David said that he was okay.

  But he still found himself in difficulties. Thereupon, the Queen leaned over and said, ‘Secretary of State, I cut up the meat for the corgis each morning, so please let me help you.’ Of course David assented.

  From some awkward experiences, I have learned never to refuse help with my dinner plate, especially at dinner parties or in restaurants.

  A month after I mused how my blindness was as central to my being as my gender, I received a startling phone call. It was from Bill Shorten, one of my former students, who was then Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services. A few weeks earlier, in an equally startling phone call, I had been approached to put my name forward as a candidate for the UN’s new committee. During those weeks, my name had been circulated around Australia’s disabled people’s organisations.

  Bill told me they had been happy with my proposed candidature and he asked me whether I would stand for election, which would take place on 3 November 2008 in New York. In a somewhat quivery voice I said, ‘Yes, Bill,’ but even then I didn’t quite know what I was getting myself into.

  Prior to election day, I would need to travel to New York a couple of times to campaign. Here I was—a man who had to practise walking routes to go about my daily business, just like when I was a boy—seeking election to a position that would involve regularly flying around the world for years on end.

  I well remember the first of my long flights to New York. It was 5 October 2008 and Natasha Smith, my newly appointed campaign manager, met me at John F Kennedy Airport in the early evening. After some twenty-two hours of flying I was quite tired and rather disorientated.

  The following morning we walked to the Australian Mission to the United Nations. The young people from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade all seemed rather busy. I got the feeling that they didn’t want us to interfere with their work. However, it was suggested that Natasha and I should have a cup of tea with Robert Hill, the Ambassador to the United Nations and a former Howard government minister.

  Robert is a charming person and we got on well. He said, ‘Why can’t we win this one?’ and I agreed. The Ambassador said that he would ask some of his people to help, and that on my second campaigning trip he would organise an evening cocktail party to promote my election.

  While on this first campaigning trip, I turned sixty. Mary and I had several rather expensive long phone calls because I was greatly missing her and the children on my birthday. After a long and gruelling day of campaigning, one of my former students Marianne Schulze took me out for the evening. I was very tense and rather tired. We walked to the international kindergarten, where in the early dusk I could hear the voices of the small children who were being collected by their parents. This was incredibly calming because it reminded me that our world was much more than campaigning. There were children, soft words, flowers with evocative smells and the sound of trees waving in the wind.

  On my second campaigning trip in New York, I was reminded why Australia’s history of striving to provide a minimum wage that workers can actually live off has always meant so much to me.

  A group of us went out for a Thai meal. At the end we gave a 10 per cent tip, and after we left the restaurant, a waitress came running after us to explain that the tip should have been 15 per cent. She wasn’t being rude or trying to pan-handle tourists. Rather, she was so dependent on tips that chasing us down the street to explain that our tip was too low was something she had to do. This reminded me that, even today, the United States has a minimum wage that is so low it is not liveable. Without tips to supplement their incomes, Americans who work in service jobs in hotels and restaurants couldn’t really survive. I am pleased that in 2016–18, the US minimum wage was increased in a number of states and cities.

  On the top floor of the Beekman Tower, where I stayed during my campaigning trips, there is a space that operates as a bar in the evenings and serves breakfast in the mornings. On the first trip, Natasha and I had breakfasted there, and on the second trip I took Mary there for breakfast. Suddenly a waiter came close and whispered to me, ‘Different woman,’ and I whispered back, ‘Yes.’

  While campaigning, I didn’t really experience much of New York City. I spent many a wakeful night listening to New York radio and particularly to America’s National Public Radio network and to the classical-music station WQXR.

  As I muse upon my electioneering at this time, three memories come to mind. One evening, while dining with a group of Australians, I made a perhaps disdainful remark about the then Australian federal government. Almost immediately, my campaign manager, Natasha, took me aside and told me that, as I was a candidate for Australia, I had to move beyond making such remarks. If elected, I would be akin to an Ambassador for Australia. Of course she was correct.

  My second memory is of Sunday, 2 November, when Marianne Schulze collected me and took me out to experience the New York Marathon. With the tension from the election campaign, coupled with my sleeplessness, I was very tired. However, on that Sunday morning we were very close to the roadway and I could hear the runners’ footfalls and heavy breathing as they streaked past.

  My final memory took place in my Beekman apartment on the morning of the election. I got dressed, had breakfast and waited for Natasha to see that everything was correct. She came in and said, ‘I don’t like that shirt! It’s not the right one. Take it off and find another.’ I felt somewhat embarrassed; but dutifully and shyly I obeyed and was well kitted out for the afternoon. That evening, I had the joy of Natasha introducing me to her partner, Jane, and I am delighted that they now have a daughter; but I shall never forget the meticulous way she trained me in the art of United Nations electioneering.

  Monday, 3 November 2008 was my CRPD Committee Election Day. I remember the scene as though it were yesterday.

  I was one of twenty-three candidates competing for twelve places on this new UN committee. The odds were encouraging. Most of us were persons with disabilities and all of us were anxious to be elected as inaugural members. There I was, in my best suit with my tie tightly knotted, in a big room in the United Nations headquarters in New York, sitting right behind Ambassador Robert Hill with all the ambassadors from the forty nation-members arranged around this long curved table. My campaign team sat behind me, led of course by Natasha Smith and Marianne Schulze. Other friends were also in the room.

  After the Chairperson stated that all the forty-one delegates present were credentialed to take part in the election, the voting papers were handed out. I tapped Robert on the shoulder, saying, ‘Now remember, Ambassador, how we are to vote.’ He didn’t reply. Instead, he looked at me laconically, or so I imagined, as rather a greenhorn here in the United Nations.

  Campaigning had taught me some home truths about myself. I really wanted to win, and I didn’t quite know how I would face people back in Australia as a losing candidate. Sleep had eluded me the previous nights, and I felt strange and tense. I didn’t
much like these character traits and especially this element of competitiveness. It showed a somewhat harsh edge to my personality that I would have preferred was not there. I would like to think that the achievements that had led me to the place where I sat were products of working very hard and being in the right place at the right time. But now, sitting sweating in that stuffy room, I had to admit that my competitive zeal may have played a greater part in my life than I cared to acknowledge.

  Then the Chairperson read out the names of the successful candidates. My name was the eighth announced. I jumped up and raised up my hands in my characteristic way and whisper-yelled, ‘Yes!’ Ambassador Hill suggested sotto voce that this was the United Nations and, really, I should sit down. I had a thing or two to learn about decorum in the world of diplomats. I could hardly wait until I could phone Mary and the children.

  Afterwards we all had a few drinks and dinner, and then Natasha took me back to my apartment at the Beekman, where I did a couple of press and radio interviews via my mobile phone. Then I was alone, pacing up and down the apartment’s living room, trying to sort everything out in my mind. How had it come to this? How was it that I had come to be a member of a United Nations human rights committee, with responsibility for the rights of persons with disabilities all around the world? How had this happened, considering my less-than-auspicious beginnings?

  November 2008 was a month filled with hope. On 4 November, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, the first person of colour to hold this office. His wonderful victory speech on that cool Tuesday evening in Chicago resonated with me. I sat listening to the television in the Los Angeles Airport lounge. Obama had campaigned using the slogan ‘Change we can believe in’ and then ‘Change we need’. The mood that evening was euphoric. Caught up in the excitement of this historic moment, I was moved that he identified persons with disabilities as an important group in American society.

  In a nutshell, the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is a human rights treaty. The CRPD is needed because so many of us persons with disabilities throughout the world are unable to fully enjoy all of the human rights and dignity that most able-bodied persons take for granted.

  The primary work of the UN Committee I had now joined was to monitor how the CRPD was being globally implemented. We invited the governments of many countries to come to Geneva and to participate in a constructive dialogue with the CRPD Committee. In addition to hearing from governments, it was vital to obtain information from persons with disabilities who lived in the relevant country, because they were able to tell us what was occurring in their lives.

  In UN-speak, meetings of the human rights committees are called sessions, and the CRPD Committee held its first session in Geneva on the morning of Monday, 23 February 2009. Honestly, I didn’t quite know what to expect. The United Nations permitted each member to bring an assistant, so Mary travelled with me to Geneva.

  I remember being very nervous as I dressed in a strange hotel room early that morning. After breakfast, we put on our coats and gloves, because Geneva in February is rather chilly. We then took the tram from our hotel to the Palais des Nations, which is the headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva. We walked under the many flags—I could hear them flapping in the crisp air—then went through security and found ourselves in this big cluster of buildings.

  The other UN committees usually met at Palais Wilson. However, in February 2009 the Palais Wilson was not an accessible building for my sisters and brothers in wheelchairs. This was despite the fact that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights had their offices there. The fact that there was a physical barrier preventing persons with disabilities from participating in what went on inside such a key UN building was not due to any lack of funds. Many UN buildings were inaccessible for persons with disabilities and this was due in large part to the fact that UN officials did not expect persons with disabilities to enter its buildings.

  The Palais des Nations, where the new committee first met, had been constructed in the 1930s. It was not very accessible and it had very few accessible toilets, but with effort we were able to meet there. Nine of us were persons with disabilities—of blindness, paraplegia and psychosocial disabilities such as overwhelming depression. This was the first occasion when a majority of the members of a United Nations Human Rights Treaty Body committee were persons with disabilities.

  In fact, I suspect that very few, if any, persons with disabilities had ever been members of the other human rights treaty bodies previously, so this marked a huge change for the United Nations. We came from Asia, Europe, South America and of course Australia, and I was the only native English speaker in the group.

  There was a microphone in front of me and I had an earpiece, because our meeting would be simultaneously translated into English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin. Immediately in front of me was my flag, which I was required to raise if I wished to speak. Mary always assisted me to raise my flag and, throughout my six years on the CRPD Committee, my assistants were alert to raising the flag whenever I signalled to them, sometimes desperately, that I needed to speak.

  Mohammed Al-Tarawneh from Jordan was elected as our Chairperson for 2009. When he was a teenager, Mohammed had been in a car accident in Jordan; his spine was injured and ever since he has been in a wheelchair. Mohammed studied hard and qualified in the United States as an engineer.

  Safak Pavey was appointed as the first Secretary of the CRPD Committee and she took up her duties in about July 2010. She was born in Turkey, but in 1996, when she was about nineteen, she lost her left arm and left leg in a train accident. Rather than just sitting back, Safak went on to study at the University of Westminster and at the London School of Economics. She then worked for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and did work in both Iran and in Afghanistan. Safak is one of the most remarkable persons with disabilities I have ever met. As soon as she became Secretary of the CRPD Committee, she set out with colleagues to make Palais Wilson accessible for us persons with disabilities.

  I would end up spending six years on the committee. Over that time I came to know other members of the CRPD Committee who, like me, were lawyers with disabilities. Maria Soledad Cisternas Reyes is from Chile and she is also blind, and like me she is a law professor. Theresia Degener is a thalidomide survivor who was born in Germany without arms. Theresia is a law professor who possesses a keen and agile mind. As she has no hands, Theresia types on her computer with her toes. I am happy to be corrected, but I believe that Theresia has published more academic material on disabilities law and practice than any other CRPD Committee member.

  Carlos Rios Espinosa is a Mexican lawyer who studied philosophy and literature in the United States. Carlos contracted polio as a child and he uses a wheelchair for mobility. Carlos is a gifted lawyer; he is loads of fun and always ready for a laugh. Damjan Tatic is a Serbian lawyer and holds a doctorate in international law. Damjan has been a wheelchair user since he was nine, owing to the muscle-wasting disease known as spinal muscular atrophy. He loves watching tennis, and we still exchange emails during Grand Slam tournaments.

  Discussions took place about who would be the Chairperson for 2010. In the end, the CRPD Committee asked me to fill this role. Being the Chair took some getting used to; I would wear earphones, in which I received the English translation, and I had in front of me my braille computer, which contained our rules of procedure. If any member wished to speak, they had to put up a flag. The unwritten rule was that the Chairperson must give the floor to speakers in the order in which their flags were raised; often a bunch of flags was raised together and on occasion this gave my assistants a hard time. It was hard work because I had to listen attentively to the translators through my earphones, and take instructions from Mary and Jose Doria from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Much of my energy was taken up with listening carefully to what my colleagues said, since it was my job to endeavour to obtain
consensus. However, if consensus was not forthcoming on a particular issue, I found it made sense simply to vote on the matter, so that everything was open and transparent. It was rather tiring, but very fulfilling. The discussions taught me both patience and tolerance, although I was occasionally frustrated by the slowness of our procedures.

  Not all UN buildings posed a physical barrier to the participation by persons with disabilities. In New York, we all benefited from the accessible conference rooms. There was room for people in wheelchairs to pass by, room for me to use my white cane, and there were easy doors, ramps and floor markings before steps. There were hearing loops, places for sign-language interpreters and captioning. Captioning occurs when the words spoken at a meeting are typed into a computer system and appear on a large screen at the back of the room. This aids deaf and hard-of-hearing people.

  In June 2010 I was invited to give a speech in Geneva to a meeting of the countries that had ratified the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, which is known as the AntiPersonnel Mine Ban Convention. I spoke about the role of the CRPD in giving a human rights dimension to persons with disabilities, which of course includes those whose disabilities have been acquired through the explosion mines and other anti-personnel devices.