Convention of Rights 23: Respect for privacy

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities (CRPD) forms the foundation of disability rights laws in Uganda and is the model for the Persons With Disabilities Act (PWDA) 2006. The CRPD underlines and recognizes that persons with disabilities (PWDs) are entitled to all the human rights enunciated in the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If you are a PWD the rights in the CRPD are your rights, if you do not have a disability it is your duty to uphold and promote these rights.

Article 22 of the CRPD says: 1, no PWD shall be the subject of illegal interference with their personal privacy, family, home, correspondence or other types of communication. No PWD shall be the subject of unlawful attack on their honour or reputation. PWDs have the right to protection from such attacks or interference. 2, The privacy of personal health and rehabilitation records is protected the same as anyone else. 

The right to privacy is everyone's right and has implications in many settings, like for instance, health, education, work, banks and care institutions. The education book Human Rights: Yes! divides privacy into four elements that bring out some of the ramifications of the right:

• Privacy of information: The right of individuals to decide for themselves what information about them should be communicated to others and who those others may be. This information includes thoughts, opinions, actions taken when a person should reasonably expect to be acting in private, and personal information such as that related to a person’s health or finances.
• Privacy of communication: Related to privacy of information, privacy of communication refers to the security of people’s private interactions with others, including letters, telephone conversations, private face-to-face conversations, e-mails, and other forms of communication. In other words, neither the State nor private actors have a right to read your correspondence or listen to your private discussions. There are some exceptions, such as when somebody is suspected of having committed a crime, but even then there are laws that govern these exceptions to ensure that such interference is both necessary and properly handled.
• Personal environment: The right to privacy applies to one’s personal environment, primarily meaning where he or she lives, such as their home, and their family or others with whom they live. It can also apply to other personal spaces, such as a person’s car or other personal property.
• Freedom from attacks on a person’s honour or reputation: The right to privacy protects people from personal attacks on their honour or reputation. For example, unless it is true, people do not have the right to claim to others that you have engaged in some socially unacceptable or other behaviour that might be damaging to your reputation.

This Article is about respect for the private living space of everyone however they may live. For instance, the phrase in paragraph 1, regardless of place of residence, means that the right to privacy applies to anyone living in residential care as well as other types of dwelling. People living in residential care are entitled to their own private living space.

Paragraph 1 of this Article refers to family and home. The 2017 book The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: A commentary makes the following observations about the social and cultural dimensions of these words:

The CCPR (Human Rights Committee) has further highlighted that the terms family and home must be understood in conformity with the meaning that these terms have in the society of the State concerned. These concepts have indeed different meanings depending on the socio-cultural contexts and the national legal systems, therefore, they cannot be defined at international level.

Privacy is an issue for people with mental health problems in Uganda because mental health services are underfunded and over crowded. The 2016 paper Towards understanding governance issues in integration of mental health into primary health care in Uganda describes the following case:

At national level, Butabika National Referral Psychiatric hospital was renovated. In each region, a mental health unit was constructed. However, this is not the case at district level. It was noted that the district is under-resourced in terms of infrastructure, with most of the facilities having insufficient space to provide various services. At some of the health facilities, the staff can hardly find space and privacy to deliver mental health services.

If you are a PWD, you have the right to respect and privacy the same as any other person.

This community toilet block in the city of Jinja, Southeast Uganda, has facilities for disabled people.
It is important to accommodate diversity within resident groups, such as disabled people (taken into account in the community toilet block shown in Jinja, Uganda) and the elderly.
It is equally important to consider factors such as privacy, security, cleanliness and maintenance, rather than seeing construction as the end of the story.

This is written in Article 22 of the CRPD in the following way:

Article 22

Respect for privacy

1. No person with disabilities, regardless of place of residence or living arrangements, shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence or other types of communication or to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation. Persons with disabilities have the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

2. States Parties shall protect the privacy of personal, health and rehabilitation information of persons with disabilities on an equal basis with others.