From Universal Exclusion to Universal Quality: Regulating Ableism in a Digital Age

Abstract

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities ("CRPD") is the first human rights convention expressly to protect the rights of persons with disabilities. The preamble to the CRPD explains that the United Nations adopted the CRPD based on twenty-five key facts. One of the facts is "that the majority of persons with disabilities live in conditions of poverty," thus creating a "critical need to address the negative impact of poverty on persons with disabilities". Today, persons with disabilities make up approximately twenty percent of the world's poorest in developing countries. Many of the world's 650 million persons with disabilities will have their human rights violated on a daily basis. This discrimination has resulted in persons with disabilities living in poverty even in developed countries. Indeed, research has found that persons with disabilities are more impoverished in the U.S. than any other developed nation. While there is no silver bullet to reverse ableism in the community, recent law reforms have arguably created a new disability politics. The introduction of the CRPD and disability human rights paradigm has substantially altered the benchmark for how states treat persons with disabilities. The new disability human rights paradigm has built upon existing scholarship and promotes a focus on substantive realization of rights.

JEL Classification: k00