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Building the foundations : disability theory and core themes -- The protection of the rights of persons with disabilities under international human rights law before the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities -- The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities -- Equality and non-discrimination for persons with disabilities -- Accessibility for persons with disabilities -- Legal capacity and human dignity -- Persons with disabilities and the justice system -- The right to work for persons with disabilities -- Disability rights, social inclusion and core policy issues -- Disability law and policy in the European Union -- Disability discrimination in European Union law -- Accessibility in European Union law -- Disability law and policy in the Council of Europe -- Disability law and policy in the inter-American human rights system -- Disability law and policy in the African human rights system and in the Asian transnational regime.

This paper explores socio-legal issues within mental disability systems in central and eastern Europe, focusing on the ten countries which have entered into an accession partnership with the European Union (EU) and will become members within the next few years, namely (starting from the north): Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria, countries with a combined population of almost 100 million people. These EU accession countries share a recent history of either being parts of the Soviet Union (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), part of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia (Slovenia) or ruled from communist Moscow (the others).

Disabled people are subject to disability laws – such as guardianship, mental health and mental capacity legislation – which only apply to them, and which enable legal violence on the basis of disability ('disability-specific lawful violence'). While public health laws during the COVID-19 pandemic enabled coercive interventions in the general population, disabled people have additionally been subject to the continued, and at times intensified, operation of disability laws and their lawful violence. In this article we engage with scholarship on law, temporality and disability to explore the amplification of disability-specific lawful violence during the pandemic. We show how this amplification has been made possible through the folding of longstanding assumptions about disabled people – as at risk of police contact; as vulnerable, unhealthy and contaminating – into the immediate crisis of the pandemic; ignoring structural drivers of oppression, and responsibilising disabled people for their circumstances and the violence they experience.

Disabled people are subject to disability laws – such as guardianship, mental health and mental capacity legislation – which only apply to them, and which enable legal violence on the basis of disability ('disability-specific lawful violence'). While public health laws during the COVID-19 pandemic enabled coercive interventions in the general population, disabled people have additionally been subject to the continued, and at times intensified, operation of disability laws and their lawful violence. In this article we engage with scholarship on law, temporality and disability to explore the amplification of disability-specific lawful violence during the pandemic. We show how this amplification has been made possible through the folding of longstanding assumptions about disabled people – as at risk of police contact; as vulnerable, unhealthy and contaminating – into the immediate crisis of the pandemic; ignoring structural drivers of oppression, and responsibilising disabled people for their circumstances and the violence they experience.

Ontario is attempting a new politico-legal experiment to combat disability discrimination. Through consultation processes leading to binding regulations, it is enacting mandatory standards of accessibility under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 (AODA). The AODA creates an antidiscrimination regulatory process designed to offer participatory rights to persons with disabilities and other interested stakeholders in the development of accessibility standards. The standards address social areas such as customer service, employment, and information and communication, and aim to break down a host of barriers including architectural and attitudinal ones. Collaborative standard development is a new and proactive approach to addressing disability barriers in society. Consultation with citizens to create accessibility standards is a trend that is now being picked up by other provincial governments across Canada and which is currently garnering interest in other countries. But, how well does it work? Using the theoretical framework created by Cass Sunstein in his most recent work, Valuing Life: Humanizing the Regulatory State, this paper argues that the Canadian regulatory legislation and consultative processes succeed, to varying degrees, in: i) capturing qualitatively diverse goods and promoting sensible trade-offs among them, ii) taking account of values that are difficult or impossible to quantify, and iii) attempting to benefit from the dispersed information of a wide variety of human beings. At the same time, however, unlike Sunstein this paper argues for an approach to humanizing the regulatory process that does not necessarily depend on monetary valuation. Instead, in order to foster disciplinary analysis instead of intuition, further dialogue on points that need clarification is more appropriate and respectful in the context of regulating for the equality rights of persons with disabilities. This evaluation of Canadian regulation is offered in an attempt to fill a gap in the literature relating to how consultation processes of accessibility standards might be evaluated for their effectiveness.

Advocates have recently devised a radical litigation approach to force broad systemic changes in public schools using the most unlikely of tools: disability law. If they succeed, disability law stands to eclipse any other cause of action as the most effective means of school reform. This novel approach relies on groundbreaking research demonstrating a correlation between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) that children encounter outside school and the learning challenges they face in school. Focusing on this link, advocates claim that children from impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods, by virtue of where they live, have disabilities that entitle them to system-wide school remedies under federal law. While this litigation exposes the depth of student need in high-poverty communities, the strategy is legally flawed and risks under-explored collateral consequences. Although advocates are correct that many of these children warrant individual remedies, using disability law to achieve system-wide educational reform is both unwise and unfeasible. First, such claims falsely assume that schools must identify all students who have any type of disability, when in fact schools' substantive duties are limited to those students whose disabilities require special education or related services to ensure meaningful access to education. Second, disability law mandates services that meet individual students' needs. Claims seeking schoolwide programmatic changes for all students are simply not legally required. Finally, classifying entire communities as disabled is over-inclusive and has the potential to stigmatize, albeit unfairly, all impoverished minority children as impaired. This Article proposes a more nuanced litigation strategy and a broader legislative agenda. First, advocates should use schools' obligations to individual ACEs-impacted students to force schools to adopt more effective early identification processes. Schools should not assume all children have a disability, but identify those who do earlier. ...

This book investigates the implementation of disability rights and duties in the European Union, aiming to understand its functioning and explore ways forward through a critical analysis of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) within the context of international regulation.