Rachel Hurst

Dr. Rachel Mary Rosalind Hurst, CBE is the Director of Disability Awareness in Action (DAA), an international information/research/evidence network, run for and by disabled people.

Founding

The DAA was established to:

• Provide a network for the exchange of information and experience between disabled people and their representative organisations’ worldwide.
• Support disabled people’s self-advocacy
• Promote and protect disabled people’s human and civil rights

Dr. Hurst has worked with disabled people's organisations, policy-makers, governments and the UN for over thirty years on independent living, rights and justice and bioethics.

Diane Pretty's death

Following the death of Diane Pretty, a sufferer of extreme motor neurone disease, who had unsuccessfully fought for a right for assisted death, Hurst said that it would be very wrong for justice to say in certain circumstances people can die ... [I]t would be a slippery slope and many people who did not want to die could be affected.

External links

• DAA website
• Hurst's speech at the James Martin Institute, University of Oxford
• BBC report on DAA