Introduction

New Zealand’s Independent Monitoring Mechanism (IMM) is pleased to publish Making Disability Rights Real in a Pandemic. In this report, we examine New Zealand’s adherence to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Disability Convention) during the COVID-19 emergency from late March to mid-June 2020.

New Zealand’s IMM partners are the Disabled People’s Organisations (DPO) Coalition, the Ombudsman, and the Human Rights Commission (HRC). The IMM’s role is to evaluate and report on the extent to which disabled New Zealanders are realising their universal human rights set out in the Disability Convention. The IMM agreed that an addendum to our third monitoring report, Making Disability Rights Real, published in June 2020, would not be sufficient to convey the responses to this complex, distressing, and rapidly changing emergency situation. A discrete report was necessary.