Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is an international human rights treaty of the United Nations intended to protect the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities. Parties to the convention are required to promote, protect, and ensure the full enjoyment of human rights by persons with disabilities and ensure that persons with disabilities enjoy full equality under the law. The Convention serves as a major catalyst in the global disability rights movement enabling a shift from viewing persons with disabilities as objects of charity, medical treatment and social protection towards viewing them as full and equal members of society, with human rights. The convention was the first U.N. human rights treaty of the twenty-first century.
The text was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 13 December 2006, and opened for signature on 30 March 2007. Following ratification by the 20th party, it came into force on 3 May 2008. As of April 2025, it has 164 signatories and 193 parties, 192 states and the European Union. The convention is monitored by the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for which annual Conferences of States Parties to the CRPD have set guidelines since 2008. The thirteenth Conference of States Parties was scheduled to meet in New York in June 2020, then rescheduled tentatively to meet in December 2020 due to the COVID-19 crisis.
History
The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, like the other United Nations human rights conventions, resulted from decades of activity during which group rights standards developed from aspirations to binding treaties.The United Nations General Assembly adopted the 1971 Declaration on the Rights of Mentally Retarded Persons followed by the Declaration on the Rights of Disabled Persons on 9 December 1975. 1981 was the International Year of Disabled Persons; an outcome of year was the World Programme of Action Concerning Disabled Persons. The Year was followed by the Decade of Disabled Persons, 1983–1992. In 1987, a global meeting of experts to review progress recommended that the UN General Assembly should draft an international convention on the elimination of discrimination against persons with disabilities. Draft convention outlines were proposed by Italy and subsequently Sweden, but no consensus was reached. Many government representatives argued that existing human rights documents were sufficient. An International Day of Persons with Disabilities was proclaimed in 1992 General Assembly resolution 47/3. The United Nations General Assembly adopted the non-compulsory Standard Rules on the Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities on 20 December 1993. Many analysts characterized the pre-CRPD documents as "soft", in contrast with the "hard" treaty obligations of the CRPD.
In March, 2000, leaders of six international disability NGOs, along with about 20 regional and national disability organizations, adopted the "Beijing Declaration on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in the New Millennium", calling on all governments to support a Convention. In 2001, the General Assembly, following a proposal by Mexico, established an Ad Hoc Committee on a Comprehensive and Integral International Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities to consider proposals for a comprehensive and integral convention to promote and protect the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities, based on a holistic approach. Disability rights organisations, including Disabled Peoples' International, the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry, Landmine Survivors Network, and the International Disability Alliance influenced the drafting process. The International Disability Alliance served as coordinator of an ad hoc International Disability Caucus, participated actively in the drafting process, in particular seeking a role for disabled persons and their organisations in the implementation and monitoring of what became the convention.
In 2001, at the 56th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Mexico initiated negotiations, with active support from GRULAC. When support for a Convention was foundering in 2002 due to WEOG opposition, New Zealand played a pivotal role in achieving cross-regional momentum. Acting as facilitator from 2002 to 2003, New Zealand eventually assumed the formal role of Chair of the Ad Hoc Committee and led negotiations to a consensus agreement in August 2006, working closely with other Committee members Jordan, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, and South Africa, as well as Korea and Mexico. Several observers commented on the "esteem-seeking behavior" of governments, national human rights institutions, and nongovernmental organizations.
The Convention became one of the most quickly supported human rights instruments in history, with strong support from all regional groups. 160 States signed the Convention upon its opening in 2007 and 126 States ratified the Convention within its first five years. In recognition of its role in creating the convention, as well as the quality of New Zealand's landmark National Disability Strategy, Governor-General of New Zealand Anand Satyanand received the 2008 World Disability Award on behalf of the nation.
In 2015, for the first time in its short history, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities opened an investigation into a signatory state for breaching their convention obligations. The investigation was triggered by article 6 of the optional protocol, which provides that an investigation will be carried out once the committee receives "reliable information indicating grave and systematic violation" of the human rights of persons with disabilities. The government of the United Kingdom was investigated, with the final report released in 2016.
The United States has been conspicuously absent from the States Parties that have ratified or acceded to the convention. During Barack Obama's administration the U.S. became a signatory to the convention on 24 July 2009. On July 31, 2012, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee recommended U.S. ratification, "subject to three reservations, eight understandings and two declarations". In December 2012, a vote in the United States Senate fell six votes short of the two-thirds majority required for advice and consent on ratification. In July 2014, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee again approved a resolution for advice and consent, but the measure was not brought to a vote of the full Senate.
Summary
The Convention follows the civil law tradition, with a preamble, in which the principle that "all human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated "of the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action is cited. The 25-subsection preamble explicitly mentions sustainable development, notes that "disability" is an "evolving concept" involving interaction between impairments and environmental factors, and mentions the importance of a "gender perspective". The preamble is followed by 50 articles. Unlike many UN covenants and conventions, it is not formally divided into parts.Article 1 defines the purpose of the convention:
Article 2 provides definitions of some keywords in CRPD provisions: communication,, discrimination on the basis of disability, reasonable accommodation and universal design.
Article 3 delineates the CRPD's eight "general principles" described below, while Article 4 delineates parties' "general obligations."
Articles 5–32 define the rights of persons with disabilities and the obligations of states parties towards them. Many of these mirror rights affirmed in other UN conventions such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Convention Against Torture, but with specific obligations ensuring that they can be fully realized by persons with disabilities.
Rights specific to this convention include the rights to accessibility including the information technology, the rights to live independently and be included in the community, to personal mobility, habilitation and rehabilitation, and to participation in political and public life, and cultural life, recreation and sport.
In addition, parties to the Convention must raise awareness of the human rights of persons with disabilities, and ensure access to roads, buildings, and information.
Articles 33–39 govern reporting and monitoring of the convention by national human rights institutions and the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Articles 40–50 govern ratification, entry into force, relation to "regional integration organizations", reservations, amendment, and denunciation of the convention. Article 49 requires that the Convention be available in accessible formats, and Article 50 provides that the convention's "Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish texts" are "equally authentic".
Core provisions
Despite the United Nations authorizing an "official fiction" of no "new rights", CRPD provisions address a broad variety of human rights, while adding a state obligation that states provide support to guarantee rights can be practiced. Various authors group them in different categories; this entry will describe basics and mechanics, then describe three categories roughly equivalent to the disputed concept of three generations of human rights.With increasing frequency, observers have commented on the overlapping and interdependence of categories of rights. In 1993, the World Conference on Human Rights' Vienna Declaration provided in its Article 5 that since human rights were "universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated ... States have a duty to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms." Gerard Quinn specifically commented on the fact that the CRPD "co-mingles civil and political rights with economic, social and cultural rights". This is especially apparent in the CRPD where political rights have been meaningless without social and economic support for the economic and social rights are meaningless without participation.