Beyond the liberal subject: challenges in interpreting the CRPD, and the CRPD's challenges to human rights

Abstract

A great deal of scholarship has explored how human rights, through the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), should affect disability policy and practice. This paper asks the reverse question: how does the framing of rights in the CRPD affect how we need to think about human rights? The CRPD's two main human rights shifts are a strongly indivisible reading of human rights, where civil/political rights are inseparable from economic and social rights, and a much stronger realization that human rights are not just the role of governments of States Parties, but civil society more broadly. The paper explores the resulting challenges to human rights law, including ambiguities surrounding immediate and progressive realization of rights, difficulties in identifying violations of rights and determination of how enforcement is to happen, tensions in the role of the state, and the problem of getting civil society on board for human rights promotion and change.