The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Toward a New International Politics of Disability

Abstract

Jacobus tenBroek Disability Law Symposium April 17, 2009 I. INTRODUCTION The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (the Convention)1 was formally adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2006 and opened for signature and ratification in March 2007.2 It is the first global human rights convention of the 21st Century.3 It has already attracted some eightyfive ratifications and is currently in force. The speed with which it entered into force and the number of ratifications received thus far is something of a record in the United Nations. The Convention is accompanied by an Optional Protocol, which is purely optional for states, as its title suggests,.5 If states ratify the Optional Protocol then they agree to accept a complaints mechanism that will enable a new United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to entertain both group and individual complaints.6 Surprisingly for treaties such as this, there have been forty-eight ratifications of this Protocol, which is effective only in those states that have opted in.7 The Convention provides both a moral compass for change as well as legal benchmarks against which to measure that change. Regrettably, the United States did not take an active part in the negotiations during the drafting of the convention. President Obama, nevertheless, signed the Convention in July 2009.8 This lifted hearts all around the world and signaled the United States' re-engagement with disability law reform throughout the world. The Convention has since been sent by the Administration to the Senate to enable the ratification process to begin. The ratification process itself could take up to a year. Because the Convention is, in essence, a non-discrimination instrument, it is quite closely aligned with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and is indeed consonant with broader currents in United States disability law. That aspect should allow for a relatively smooth ratification process. Upon ratification, the United States will be empowered to play a full part in the new Conference of States Parties set up under the Convention, which enables states to exchange best practices. It will also enable the United States to put forward candidates for election to the new United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which performs the traditional roles assigned to a treaty-monitoring body (interpretation, the formation of conclusions, and recommendations based on periodic state reports, etc.). All in all, ratification will allow for a repositioning of the United States at the international level on disability rights. Additionally, ratification will enable the United States to contribute more directly to the process of disability law reform around the world, and learn from innovative practices that might assist it in overcoming common impasses. Some perspective on the disability challenges throughout the world is necessary to assess the potential of the Convention. It is estimated that at least ten percent of any given population has a disability, which means that nearly 650 million people worldwide have disabilities.9 According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), most of them, more than 500 million, live in developing countries.10 It is further estimated by the United Nations that twenty percent of the poorest people in the world have disabilities. Persons with disabilities have been described by the United Nations as the world's largest minority. The causes of disability vary, but they include social and economic deprivation, malnutrition, violence, and warfare.12 That is, human rights violations can lead to disability, and having a disability exposes one to a high risk of further human rights violations. The impacts of disability are enormous and include chronic under-education, higher rates of physical violence and rape, multiple forms of discrimination (especially in the case of gender), higher rates of mortality, and severe unemployment. …

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