Dubai: The Best Practices and Innovations in the Protection of People with Disabilities Forum highlighted Dubai’s efforts in making the city disability friendly.
The forum was inaugurated by Shaikh Mansour Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Head of the Higher Committee for Protecting the Rights of People with Disability.
It was organised by Dubai Police’s Human Rights Department, in cooperation with Rashid Centre for the Disabled, in commemoration of UN’s Human Rights Day.
“Every year the Human Rights Department organises events or forums to commemorate this occasion. This year we wanted the focus to be on people with disabilities,” he said.
Abdullah Al Shaibani, secretary-general of Dubai Executive Council, said that the UAE and its leadership give great importance to the needs of people with disabilities. The country, he said, has provided health and educational rehabilitation centres as well as provides necessary services to them.
“We are proud that integrating and protecting the rights of people with disability is among the leadership’s top priorities,” he said.
Mariam Othman, director of Rashid Centre for the Disabled, said that people with disabilities comprise 13.5 per cent of the world’s population.
“We have worked on spreading and deepening the community’s awareness of the issue through targeted events, publications, research and training and rehabilitation programmes. The centre’s Shaikh Rashid Award for Humanitarian Studies and Research also helped encourage researchers and inventors to work on studies and applied research that relate to people with disabilities, as well as patents and innovations, in order to contribute to the global effort to serve the largest minority in the world.”
Dubai aims to be a disability-friendly city by 2020.
