Update (4 August 2026): The consultation window described in this article closed on 3 August 2026. The Committee is now reviewing the input it received; the article remains as a record of what the guidance covers and how the process worked.
When a wildfire order comes through, when a flood takes the ground floor, when a conflict empties a city, the people most likely to be left behind are the ones who needed the plan to work in the first place. Emergency systems are built for an imagined average person who can hear the siren, read the alert, walk to the bus, and carry their own supplies. People with disabilities live outside that average every day, and in a crisis the gap becomes dangerous.
Until 3 August 2026 there was an open door to say so, directly, to the people writing the international rulebook. The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is preparing new guidance on how governments must protect people with disabilities in emergencies, and it asked for written input from anyone with something to contribute. The deadline was Monday, 3 August 2026, and it has now passed. Here is what is being written, why it carries weight, and how the input stage worked.
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Get the newsletterWhat Article 11 is about
The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is the treaty that sits underneath most modern accessibility law, including in Canada. One of its provisions, Article 11, deals only with what it calls situations of risk. It commits the states that have ratified the Convention, 185 of the 193 UN member states, Canada among them, to take all necessary measures to keep people with disabilities safe in armed conflict, humanitarian emergencies, and natural disasters.
That is a strong promise on paper. In practice it has been one of the least developed corners of the treaty. The article is short, it does not define what counts as a disaster or an emergency, and it was written before the current run of climate-driven crises made the question unavoidable. Evacuation routes that assume you can use stairs, shelters without accessible washrooms, alerts that are audio only or text only, and supply chains that forget medication, mobility equipment, and personal support: these are the recurring failures, and they repeat in emergency after emergency because the guidance underneath the promise has never been filled in.
What a general comment does, and why it matters
The Committee is now filling it in. It is drafting what the treaty system calls general comments, and for Article 11 there are two of them in progress at once, a sign of how much ground the topic covers. One zero draft deals with the obligations of States parties in situations of risk. The other deals with the impact of situations of risk. Input is invited on both.
A general comment is the treaty body’s official interpretation of what a provision requires. It is not a new law and it does not bind a court on its own. What it does is set the authoritative reading that governments are measured against. When the Committee reviews a country’s record, it uses its general comments as the yardstick. Advocates cite them in submissions. Domestic courts and tribunals reach for them when they interpret national law in light of the treaty. A clear, detailed general comment on Article 11 would turn a one-sentence promise into a checklist that emergency planners, and the people holding them to account, can actually use.
That is why the drafting stage is the stage that matters. Once the text is settled, it shapes reviews and arguments for years. Input now is input at the point where it can still change the words.
Who could send input, and how
The call was open widely, not just to governments and large agencies. The Committee invited written submissions from States, national human rights institutions, organizations of people with disabilities, other civil society groups, academics and researchers, and individuals. Lived experience of how an emergency actually unfolded for you or the people you support is exactly the kind of evidence a drafting committee needs and rarely has enough of.
A submission did not have to be a legal brief. A focused account of what failed, what worked, and what the guidance should require reads as clearly as any policy paper. The practical requirements were these:
- Write to the point. Contributors were asked to say which part of Article 11 they were addressing, what the problem looks like on the ground, and what they wanted the guidance to say about it.
- Follow the format the Committee set. Contributions went in a separate Word document, not as comments inside the zero draft, with each comment keyed to the paragraph number it responded to, limited to 4,000 words or 13 pages, in English, French or Spanish.
- Mind the deadline. Written input was due Monday, 3 August 2026; the window is now closed.
- Where it went. Submissions went through the OHCHR submissions platform, and the call page holds the two zero-draft documents. The Committee’s secretariat can be reached at ohchr-crpd@un.org.
Submissions are ordinarily published on the Committee’s website, so anyone who contributed should expect their submission to be treated as a public document unless they asked otherwise.
Three other Committee texts were open for input on the same date. The Committee also sought written submissions on a draft general comment on Article 29, the right to take part in political and public life, and on two sets of draft guidelines, one on identifying and addressing intersectional discrimination against women and girls with disabilities, and one on identifying and addressing disability-based violence. That call also closed on 3 August 2026.
Why a Canadian voice belongs in this
Canada ratified the Convention in March 2010, with the support of all provinces and territories, and is one of the countries this guidance will eventually be used to assess. Canadian organizations of people with disabilities, researchers, and individuals could all contribute, and the experiences here are directly relevant: wildfire evacuations across the West, flooding, ice storms and long power outages, and the northern and remote communities where an emergency and a lack of accessible services already overlap. The details of how those events played out for people with disabilities are evidence the Committee is asking for.
International guidance can feel far away from a local evacuation order. The drafting stage was the moment it came closest to reach, and the window stayed open until 3 August 2026. Whether a person sent three paragraphs or an organization sent thirty pages, the record of what emergencies actually do to people with disabilities is built from contributions like these. The next stage belongs to the Committee, which reviews the input as it settles the final text; the drafts and, in time, the published submissions sit on the call page linked below.
Sources: OHCHR, Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (calls for input); UN DESA, Article 11 Situations of risk and humanitarian emergencies; OHCHR, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; OHCHR, Calls for Input listing; OHCHR, Call for inputs: draft general comments on article 11; OHCHR, Calls for Input register, Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; OHCHR, Call for inputs: draft general comment on article 29 and draft guidelines (deadline 3 August 2026); Government of Canada, Canada Ratifies UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (March 2010)
