Don't forget the disabled

Don't forget the disabled

BY YI LIANG

It’s time society took care of its more vulnerable members.

THE Klang Valley is no place for a person with a disability. I see it all the time. Uneven, cracked and narrow pavements built beside busy roads choked with traffic. Three-storey shophouses with no lifts, just flights and flights of stairs. And fast-food joints that no wheelchair user can enter – with floors raised high above the five-foot-way and no ramp in sight.

My significant other, Keisha, and I often encounter this when we bring her dogs for their walk around her Sri Hartamas neighbourhood. She has to drive her powered wheelchair on the road, instead of the safer, traffic-free pavement – as the pavements in this upper-middle class neighbourhood are too narrow, too cracked for the power chair.

If Keisha were to drive her chair on it, and believe me, we have tried – there is the real risk of its wheels getting stuck in a crack or slipping off into a grassy ditch when she tries to make a turn, among other potential hazards.

How about the shopping centres then? For the most part, they pass muster. But we have had our share of incidents, such as when we went to pick up dinner at a fast food outlet earlier this week. We thought it would be a quick, uneventful in-and-out affair.

But there was one problem. She couldn’t enter the outlet as their floor was raised too high above the five-foot-way for her wheelchair to enter, its wheels spinning with futility, stuck against the step created by the raised floor. What was needed was a ramp – and there was none in sight.

Speaking up to the outlet’s management turned out to be a finger-pointing exercise, as they said the building management prohibited them from making any modifications to the frontage outside their shop.

That got me thinking – what legal rights does a person with a disability have in this country? How can we all speak up to say “Hey, they’re people. They have equal rights, too!”

Naturally, I turned to the Federal Constitution – and Article 8 caught my eye. It basically reads:

> All persons are equal before the law and entitled to the equal protection of the law;

> Except as expressly authorised by this Constitution, there shall be no discrimination against citizens on the ground only of religion, race, descent, gender or place of birth in any law relating to the acquisition, holding or disposition of property or the establishing or carrying on of any trade, business, profession, vocation or employment; and

> There shall be no discrimination in favour of any person on the ground that he is a subject of the Ruler of the State.

When I read it, a chill went down my spine. At face value, the Federal Constitution appears to be silent when it comes to protecting people with disabilities.

It prohibits religious discrimination, racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and discrimination of people based on their place of birth, but when it comes to protecting against discrimination for people with disabilities, Article 8 is silent on this point – creating a grey area in the law, and the usual method of clearing this confusion is by filing a lawsuit, such as a discrimination suit – and fighting it all the way to the Federal Court.

And such lawsuits can take a decade or perhaps even longer to reach the Federal Court.

Factoring in the time, the cost and the psychological toll of such a lawsuit, not to mention the forest that would have to die to make all the paperwork needed for it – there has to be a better way to set in stone the legal rights of people with disabilities in Malaysia.

Which is why I consulted Malaysian Bar Council president Christopher Leong to get an authoritative take on the matter – and in his expert view, Article 8 combined with Article 5(1) gives rights to people with disabilities, as the right to life laid down in Article 5(1) is far-reaching in its definition of a right to life.

The article states simply that “no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty save in accordance with law”.

“Article 5(1) guarantees everyone the right to life, and when we talk about the right to life, we are not talking about mere existence. It also speaks of the quality of life. So you read Article 5(1) with Article 8, which says that everybody must be treated with equality under the law,” said Leong.

“The two Articles read together places an obligation on the state to provide as far as possible the same quality of life for all persons, including persons with disabilities. Article 8 should also be read to mean that laws should be enacted to provide for the disadvantaged so they may be treated equally,” he added.

Ultimately, what does all this legalese mean?

It means a platform exists to press for real on-the-ground equality for people with disabilities – whether it means writing to building management bodies, municipal councils, state assemblymen, MPs or even Cabinet ministers to press for reforms, to remind them that every person in Malaysia has the equal right to fair treatment, be they “normal” or a person with a disability.

It means no-one has any excuse to treat people with disabilities as inferior human beings or to deny them their Constitutional right to be integrated within the fabric of society –be it in schools, institutions of higher learning, hospitals, workplaces or even theme parks and shopping malls.

So with these tools – let’s speak up, forge ahead and don’t give up the fight!

> The writer wonders how many Helen Kellers, Stephen Hawkings and Franklin Delano Roosevelts we have lost due to prejudice, ignorance and apathy. The views expressed are entirely the writer’s own.