Dear HumanDHS Friends

From Michael Perlin (HumanDHS Advisory Board)
Dear all:

As many of you know, I have been working for the last several years, trying to help create a Disability Rights Tribunal for Asia and the Pacific. I’ve given multiple workshops on this topic, have recently published a law review article (Promoting Social Change in Asia and the Pacific: The Need for a Disability Rights Tribunal to Give Life to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 44 GEO. WASH.

INT’L L. REV. 1 (2012)), discussed it at the December 12 HDHS meeting, and have devoted two years of my Project-Based Learning course at New York Law School to this project.

I learned recently that this idea has been nominated by the Innovating Justice Forum of the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (see generally, http://www.hiil.org) for the “Awards Round” of its yearly effort to identify the most promising developments in the field of international justice (see, on our program, http://www.innovatingjustice.com/innovations/creation-of-a-disability-rights-tribunal-for-asia-and-the-pacific).

Voting is now open as to which of the nominated awards is chosen as the most important justice innovation of the year (see, for voting, http://www.innovatingjusticeawards.com/Vote-on-Participants/155).

I tell all who ask that, if this Tribunal is to be created, it will be the most significant achievement of my legal career. Much more important, it will bring the possibility of justice to an untold number of residents with disabilities in Asian and Pacific nations (there is no regional human rights court or commission in that part of the world, and that’s one of the inspirations for the work we’ve done). My colleague and friend, Yoshi Ikehara, Esq., (head of the Tokyo Advocacy Law Office), first came up with this idea in a conversation we had about six years ago; we’ve done work in at least nine Asian and Pacific nations, and are picking up significant support from most of these . The more votes we get on this website, the more this venture will be noticed.

Thanks for listening.

Best,
Michael
Prof. Michael L. Perlin
Director, International Mental Disability Law Reform Project Director, Online Mental Disability Law Program New York Law School
185 West Broadway
New York, NY 10013
212-431-2183
mperlin@nyls.edu