The Gold Indicators: Measuring 10 key thematic areas to improve the situation of persons with disabilities
Do persons with disabilities consider public transportation to be accessible? How many persons with disabilities voted in the most recent election to the Danish Parliament? What is the rate of employment of persons with disabilities? These and more are some of the areas addressed by the ten Gold Indicators on the CRPD.
As a part of our ongoing effort to monitor, promote and protect the implementation of the CRPD, the Danish Institute for Human Rights introduces ten carefully selected indicators to measure and monitor the progress of the implementation of the CRPD.
”We are extremely pleased that we now have an effective tool to measure progress with the implementation of the convention, and hopefully this will inspire the government to speed things up”, says Department Director, Maria Ventegodt Liisberg.
The purpose of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities.
This means that society needs to be accessible so that persons with disabilities are able to participate in daily life.
Denmark joined the CRPD in 2009, and since 2011 the Danish Institute for Human Rights has been appointed as the independent mechanism for monitoring, promoting, and protecting the implementation of the CRPD in Denmark in accordance with Article 33(2) of the CRPD.
The name ‘Gold Indicators’ is chosen since each indicator is carefully selected and formulated, following a qualifying and dialogue-based procedure, thus representing a national ‘gold standard’ for measuring the progress of the implementation of the CRPD. The main purpose of the indicators is to generate change and stimulate action because we believe that statistical indicators have the potential to inspire concrete policy-making.
Making equal treatment measurable
Currently, there is only limited data on the majority of the Gold Indicators. The survey that comes closest to covering the Gold Indicators is the Danish National Centre for Social Research’s ‘Survey on Health, Impairment and Living Conditions in Denmark’ (SHILD). The Danish Institute for Human Rights hopes that the Gold Indicators will be incorporated the SHILD survey scheduled to be conducted in 2016.
“We hope the relevant authorities make sure to collect the necessary data regularly to cover the Gold Indicators and link the indicators to national goals in this field”, says Maria Ventegodt Liisberg.
Comparing the situation of persons with and without disabilities
The Gold Indicators make it possible to compare the situation of persons with disabilities to that of persons without disabilities. The ten thematic areas covered by the Gold Indicators have been chosen with inspiration in the founding principles of the CRPD described in Article 3 of the convention. They include equality and non-discrimination, liberty and personal integrity, health, education and political participation.
The Gold Indicators are a set of 10 statistical outcome indicators that compares the situation for persons with and without disabilities in relation to 10 thematic areas of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
The Gold Indicators are so-called ‘outcome human rights indicators’ as they measure the situation of individuals, as opposed to process or structural indicators that measure for instance whether specific legislation or action plans are in place.
An inclusive process
The Gold Indicators were developed through an inclusive process with multiple national disability organisations, academic researchers, relevant Danish ministries, Statistics Denmark and the Danish National Centre for Social Research. This has been done to ensure that the indicators cover essential areas within CRPD and are the best-suited to measure the implementation of the convention in Denmark.
The inclusion of relevant stakeholders promotes the idea that that the Gold Indicators are the best-suited indicators to measure and monitor the process of the implementation of the CRPD nationally. Moreover, stakeholder participation enhances the probability that the indicators will be used to oversee the implementation process in a national context.
It is the institute’s hope that the Gold Indicators will become a powerful tool for monitoring and promoting the implementation process of the CRPD and will serve as an inspiration to other national human rights institutions, governments, disability organisations as well as international organisations in their work with the CRPD.