Switzerland was reviewed under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities between March 14-16, 2022, in Geneva, Switzerland. The independent experts of the Committee posed questions to Switzerland on progress made on its implementation of the Convention, including numerous questions on international cooperation. Following the review, the Committee released recommendations, also known as ‘Concluding Observations’, which the Swiss Government must now implement and present progress on during the next review in 2028.

Overall, SDDC is pleased with the recommendations made by the Committee. They reflect the remaining gaps for achieving a disability inclusive Swiss development cooperation and reinforce what the SDDC has been calling for time and time again. They demonstrate that Switzerland still has some basic steps to take, notably the adoption of guidelines to ensure that all international cooperation programmes are disability inclusive. The guidelines should serve as a baseline for disability inclusion across all of Switzerland’s development and humanitarian work.

The Committee made recommendations to the Swiss government on the following areas with explicit reference to implementation within Swiss international cooperation and humanitarian action:

1. Ensuring the participation of persons with disabilities in strategies and programmes as well as the SDGs (Concluding Observation no. 10a, 62b);
2. Mainstreaming the rights of women with disabilities across international cooperation strategies and programmes and ensuring their effective participation (14a, 14c);
3. Adopting an action plan to implement the Charter on the Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Action (24b);
4. Collecting and disaggregating data on disability in all humanitarian and development programmes (60c);
5. Adopting guidelines to ensure that all international cooperation programmes are disability-inclusive (62a);
6. Consistently applying the OECD DAC disability marker (62c).

Read more in SDDC’s analysis on International Cooperation

The full list of Concluding Observations can be found here