Provision of Live Captioning Services

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva services the international human rights mechanisms, including the expert bodies established to monitor the implementation of the international human rights treaties (the “treaty bodies”). There are at present ten treaty bodies in operation, one of which is the Committee on the Right of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), monitoring the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The Convention adopts a broad categorization of persons with disabilities and reaffirms their human rights and fundamental freedoms.

The members of the Committee serve in their individual capacity. They are elected by States Parties for a four-year term, with a possibility of one re-election.

The main functions of the Committee are to examine reports that States Parties must submit regularly on how they implement the rights enshrined in the Convention, making suggestions and general recommendations to that end to the State Party concerned, and considering individual complaints about alleged violations of the rights provided for in the Convention. The Committee normally meets in Geneva and holds two sessions per year, each of one week’s duration.

The Committee, at its first session in February 2009, requested the Secretariat to take measures to ensure that all persons with disabilities have full access to its meetings and those of all the human rights mechanisms. Drawing attention to article 9 of the Convention, the Committee requested the Secretariat to ensure that all aspects of accessibility are taken into consideration. In response to this request, the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG) seeks to establish long-term arrangements to henceforth provide captioning of all future sessions of the Committee

To provide captioning services for the sessions of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, that take place in Geneva.

Captioning refers to a service whereby the verbal proceedings of a meeting are typed in real-time on a large screen in the conference room. It is also requested that the electronic version of the transcripts be shared with OHCHR at every pause, which would be shared with members of the Committee and audience who so request them.

Beneficiaries
The visual written representation of the spoken word would enable persons who are hard of hearing or deaf to fully follow the deliberations of the Committee. The typing would be saved in an electronic format (MS Word), which would be shared with those who request a copy. These would typically include deafblind or visually impaired persons, who upon receiving a copy would be able to convert it, through their own personal conversion programmes, into a format that they can read. While this would be not in real time, but with a slight delay, they would nevertheless be able to follow the Committee’s deliberations much more closely than would otherwise be possible..