Malaysia disregarding its disability rights law, columnist says

From the intro to a column in The Star in Malaysia:

The Persons With Disabilities Act 2008 has been reduced to a mere administrative document. Who then can the disabled turn to for help?

Unlike previous seminars held at the Bar Council headquarters, there was a conspicuous absence of Special Branch officers at the recent talk on “Persons with Disabilities Act 2008: What Next?”

The Bar Council’s Human Rights Committee chairman, Edmund Bon, reckoned it was because the disabled community was perceived as “non-threatening”.

It may not have had the tension and drama that come with some of the more explosive issues that the Bar Council had attempted to address, but it was no less emotionally-charged. No less gut-wrenching, when participants shared how time and again they had been discriminated against by a system that was divided by the them-and-us polemics.

Among them was Christine Lee of Barrier-Free Environment and Accessible Transport (BEAT). Even though the Persons With Disabilities Act (PWDA) had come
into force last July to accord equal rights to the disabled, Lee still found herself being discriminated against on account of her physical disability.

Just two days before the Bar Council meeting, she was invited to speak at a hotel. However, upon reaching the hotel, she discovered there was no parking space allocated for wheelchair users, forcing her to park her car at the VIP bay. The hotel staff warned that if she did, they would clamp her car. Sure enough, after her talk, she found her car clamped and was told to pay a fine.

“Why should I be made to pay for a service the hotel had failed to provide?” Lee asked. It was only after talking to the senior hotel management staff that they released her car without imposing a fine on her.

How ironic that Lee was penalised when the builders of the hotel had flouted the Uniform Building By-Laws by failing to provide facilities for the disabled. This incident underscores the fact that despite being touted as a rights-based law, the PWDA is silent on sanctions and penalties against parties that discriminate against the disabled.