The
General Assembly adopted the
Convention to Promote and Protect the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities (Disabilities Convention) during its 61st session in 2006.
There have been calls for a convention protecting and promoting the rights of people with disabilities since the mid-1980s. These proposals were rejected, however, based on the argument that existing human rights conventions adequately covered persons with disabilities. After years of campaigning on this issue, the General Assembly established an Ad hoc Committee to consider the need for a convention in December 2001. In a series of eight meetings over the course of five years, the text of the Disabilities Convention was drafted. The process was notable for the substantial contribution of NGOs in the drafting of the Disabilities Convention, especially organisations of persons with disabilities.
The Disabilities Convention was welcomed by disabled persons’ organisations and other civil society organisations as a significant advancement of the rights of persons with disabilities as equal members of society.
The objective of the Disabilities Convention is to ‘promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity’.
While the Disabilities Convention is a comprehensive human rights treaty, it does not create new rights for persons with disabilities. It focuses on particular aspects of well-established rights found in the body of international human rights law, and reaffirms them in the context of disability. This includes both traditional civil and political, and economic, social and cultural rights as well as specific rights and issues that are closely linked to disability such as the right to live independently and to personal mobility. The Disabilities Convention therefore serves to clarify the obligations that States have towards persons with disabilities and the measures they need to take to ensure the effective enjoyment of their rights. It prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities in relation to the enjoyment of these rights.
It also creates a new treaty-monitoring body, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which will supervise the implementation of the Disabilities Convention. In cases where a State has ratified the optional protocol to the Convention, the Committee will also be able to receive complaints from individuals about violations of their rights under the Convention.
