About Gerard’s mandate
About Gerard’s mandate
The mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities was created in 2014 by the Human Rights Council to alert the international community about these and other pressing issues facing people with disabilities in different parts of the world, and to help countries come up with the right solutions to them. In October of 2020, Gerard was appointed to carry out this mandate, until October 2023.
The Special Rapporteur is part of a system called UN Special Procedures:
The special procedures of the Human Rights Council are independent human rights experts with mandates to report and advise on human rights from a thematic or country-specific perspective. They are non-paid and elected for 3-year mandates that can be reconducted for another three years. As of October 2021, there are 45 thematic and 13 country mandates.
This video shows what they do, and how their work contributes to protecting human rights defenders, and the rights of millions of the most vulnerable people around the world:
