Disability in International Human Rights Law

Abstract This book examines what international human rights law has gained from the new elements in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons (CRPD). It explores how the CRPD is intricately bound up with other international instruments by studying the relationship between the Convention rights and those protected by other human rights treaties as well as the overall objectives of the UN. Using a social model lens on disability, the book shows how the Convention sheds new light on the very notion of human rights. In order to so, the book provides a theoretical framework which explicitly integrates disability into international human rights law. It explains how the CRPD challenges the legal subject by drawing attention to distinct forms of embodiment, before introducing the idea of the ‘dis-abled subject’ stemming from a recognition that all individuals encounter disability-related issues in the course of their lives. The book also examines how to apply this theoretical framework to a number of rights and highlights the consequences for the implementation of human rights treaties as a whole. It not only builds upon available literature straddling different fields, which include disability studies and legal and political theory, but also draws upon the recommendations of treaty bodies and reports of UN agencies as well as disabled people’s organisations. The book provides an agenda-setting analysis for all human rights experts by inviting them to appreciate the benefits of placing disabled people at the heart of international human rights law.