 My journey on human rights started when I was very young, around 15, and I've always felt injustice very personally. I had my accident when I was 14. I was very protected by my family and my friends. So it was very normal to me the transition into being a person with disability until I got to be out in the labour market and I finished my university. It was very shocking, I would say, to encounter the level of discrimination that as a person with disability you face every day at every step in the streets. So I was very active in the social movements, unionist structures, work in social contexts. So I was part of the social movement without really identifying with the disability rights movement. And it was around the year 2000 when I encountered a group of activists that are still working on disability rights in my country in Argentina that were promoting this idea of the social model of disability. It was then that I really understood that I could make a huge contribution to disability rights and it really shifted my mind about myself and the role of society in what I was experiencing every day. And until that moment disability was, I think it happens for many persons with disabilities, it was a personal burden, right? It was something I had to do with me and it wasn't really about my context or the society in itself. And at that moment I realised that it wasn't a personal issue, it was actually the fact that I couldn't walk or that I couldn't manage through my everyday life without support. It wasn't something that was only about myself, it was really something that through policy, through work on human rights, this could change, right? So my experience of injustice was very personal. I lived with it many, many years and at some point it hit me that I was living that discrimination of my everyday life and I could do something about it. I started to realise that you cannot focus only on one thing, that the barriers that people with disabilities face are multiple and they are multi-dimensional and that are interrelated to the realities of many others, right? And it was the experience of my mom and my brother and my family in that specific context that also really brought to me this idea that we need better structures to have a life that is equal to everybody else's, right? An important part of that journey was related to promote the rights of persons with disabilities to live independently and to be part of the community. And for the last 20 years I've been working on that area because I truly believe that if you cannot get out of bed and get out in the street and do something, go to school or to participate in the community, the realisation of our human rights is impossible in practice. We do many things in our team and some of them are related to support to states to provide them with the necessary guidance on human rights of persons with disabilities and how to advance in many, many areas. One of those areas is related to support systems. And currently there is a, because of the pandemic, discussions on care systems started to evolve very quickly. And this is because the pandemic put all systems under a level of pressure that really were not prepared to face. And this impacted the whole society, right? It's not only about persons with disabilities. It impacted women that were overburdened because of the stereotypical roles of care that are imposed on them. It overburdened children that had to change the logics of how they usually access to support including through education, for example. Other persons that were among the most affected, particularly all the persons with disabilities with a disproportionate number of deaths because of the pandemic and also persons with disabilities, right? That also face a disproportionate number of deaths in this context, particularly in institutionalised contexts, right? In social care institutions and mental health institutions. It was very dramatic, I would say, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic to see that all the people that looked and lived like me were dying around us, right? And it was extremely, extremely hard, right? And this, I think it created a momentum to, I would say, to rebound the conversations that have over 40 years from the disability rights movement and from the women rights movement to advance this agenda. And care has always been very problematic for persons with disabilities. Me myself, I grew in a structure of care that always had put me in a passive role as a recipient of care that has never been the choice that I would have made, right? And so I live it very personally in that sense. And care ethics that are related to that are both affecting persons with disabilities but they are also putting women in a very tough situation, right? Over 80% of the people that are providing care around the world are women and these traditional care systems treat unfairly both women and persons with disabilities in this process, right? So this moment that we are living after or in the relative aftermath of the pandemic it's really a wake-up call to move in this direction, right? And there is a big change compared to what it used to be, right? And I think that's an amazing opportunity both for persons with disabilities and for women rights organizations to rethink and reimagine what is support and care going to look like in the future. We need to explain better how those principles apply to persons with disabilities. So what is being free and equal? What is facing discrimination when you are a person with disabilities? What is the equal recognition before the law that is in the UDHR? What is social protection for persons with disabilities? And how the right to development can contribute, for example, to the rights of persons with disabilities in that sense. So it's a complex machinery with multiple interests that go from the realities of families of persons with disabilities themselves, of communities and where people live, the role of states, how to structure social protection systems, what is support and to what extent support really can enable persons with disabilities without impeding the realization of the human rights of women. So all of these components must come into one space, and our job is to try to explain and put all those items, let's say, of a system in a way that is promoting human rights and that is moving away from these traditional care systems that have failed us during the pandemic. And persons with disabilities are not, let's say, a homogeneous group, right? We are people with multiple identities, with coming from different contexts, with different cultures, and our impairments are only one part of ourselves, right? And they are just one part of our identity. And we have also multiple impairments, right? There are people that cannot see, that cannot walk, can hear, that has impairments that may not be obvious when you see that person, so we come in all shapes and forms. And all those realities also have to be part of the conversation. And there is no better way of promoting change than facing others with that otherness, right? I think that first-hand experience is the most powerful tool of transformation that we can have.