In a bustling conference hall at the United Nations headquarters in New York in June, delegates from around the world gathered for the United Nation’s seventeenth annual Conference of States Parties to the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (COSP17); among them was Alice Bruil, an undergraduate at the Jackson School majoring in Global and Regional Studies.
Bruil attended COSP17 as a delegate from the Lotus Center for Rights Research, a non-governmental organization (NGO) founded by Law, Societies and Justice lecturer Megan McCloskey. She had previously worked with McCloskey as part of the University of Washington Disability Inclusive Development Initiative (DIDI), where Bruil is a fellow.
Along with McCloskey and other DIDI fellows, Bruil conducted research and wrote a report focused on the intersectionality of disability rights and global issues in countries like Bangladesh, Colombia, Germany, and Uganda. “We were all assessing the implementation of the Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities in these countries and how well they accord with the national laws, regarding refugees with disabilities,” Bruil said.
The largest obstacle researchers on this project faced, according to Bruil, was insufficient data collection. “NGOs and governments aren’t able to accommodate for this population because they don’t know how many refugees there are or how their safety is being put at risk, it’s not information that’s available,” she said.
Through the DIDI’s report, Bruil hopes to bring awareness to more robust data collection practices. “I think that really bringing attention to it is the most impactful thing that someone can do,” she said. “So I hope to do that, to share everything that I’ve learned with people when I’m having discussions about things that pertain to people with disabilities, which is generally every topic, because it’s so pertinent.”
Another particularly challenging moment came when Bruil, who analyzed policies in Uganda, had to present her findings. “The presentation was the day that I left Seattle for the Boren [Undergraduate Scholarship] Convocation,” she said. “So I had quite a time trying to arrange how that was going to work, but I did my part of the presentation in the airport.”
Once she arrived in New York, Bruil remembered how unreal it felt stepping into the hallowed halls of the United Nations.
“You go into these huge round conference rooms with the microphones and the country plaques, and it just feels very surreal,” Bruil said. “It felt surreal for me, because I’ve always dreamed of doing something like this since I started studying international relations.”
Bruil credits her time in the Jackson School for providing her a set of skills that proved useful at COSP17. “The Jackson School really pushes you to be more well-rounded and to always keep exploring new areas of study because that all intersect,” she said, adding “the collaboration in classes, whether it’s in discussions or group projects … it’s all to prepare us for this kind of large-scale collaboration. I think that doing those kinds of things is preparing us to become better diplomats, better senators, whatever we want to become.”
