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US Senate Panel Advances Global Disabilities Treaty


A U.S. Senate committee voted on Tuesday to advance a U.N. treaty to protect people with disabilities from discrimination, but the agreement faces a tough fight winning the two-thirds majority needed for ratification by the full Senate.

Although 146 nations and the European Union have ratified the United Nations convention, it has failed to win approval in the deeply divided Senate, where many conservatives are wary of subjecting American social policies to global laws.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 12-6 in favor of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Only two Republicans, John McCain of Arizona and John Barrasso of Wyoming, joined the panel's 10 Democrats in favor.

The treaty is supported by leading U.S. military veterans organizations, advocates for the rights of people with disabilities and business groups.

Opponents, including many socially conservative Republicans, worry it could expand abortion rights, threaten U.S. parental rights such as the ability to home-school children, and shift power from U.S. states to the federal government.

The treaty's backers dismissed those concerns and accused opponents of injecting divisive social issues into the debate to score political points. "It is so wrong to the disabled people to catch them up in this debate," Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California said during heated discussions in the committee meeting.

Backers said the agreement would face stiff resistance winning the 67 votes it would need to be ratified by the full 100-member Senate, where Republicans hold 45 seats.

The treaty was defeated by just five votes in the Senate in 2012. McCain, a war veteran and strong advocate for the treaty, said: "We won't quit on this issue because we believe it is a fundamental issue of human rights."

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    Reuters

    Reuters is a news agency founded in 1851 and owned by the Thomson Reuters Corporation based in Toronto, Canada. One of the world's largest wire services, it provides financial news as well as international coverage in over 16 languages to more than 1000 newspapers and 750 broadcasters around the globe.

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