Gary Malkowski, the first deaf member of a provincial parliament in Canadian history, delivered a powerful advocacy address at Gallaudet University in 2011 while receiving an honorary doctorate. Malkowski traced the long history of the deaf community's fight for linguistic rights, beginning with the devastating 1880 International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Milan, which banned sign languages from classrooms worldwide. Malkowski celebrated the 2010 reversal of those Milan resolutions and the landmark United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which formally defined sign languages as equal to spoken languages. With 147 countries signed and 99 having ratified the convention, he declared this the most powerful ammunition yet in the fight for deaf education rights. His assertion that sign language is a human right—not merely an option—represented decades of advocacy and carried special weight delivered at Gallaudet, the institution that bravely continued using sign language in its classrooms even during the century-long ban.