The Role of Reasonable Accommodation in Securing Substantive Equality for Persons with Disabilities: The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

24 Pages Posted: 1 Jun 2010

See all articles by Janet Lord

Janet Lord

American University; Harvard University - Harvard Law School; University of Maryland School of Law

Rebecca Brown

International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net)

Date Written: 2010

Abstract

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD or Convention) elaborates for the first time in a legally binding international human rights convention the concept of reasonable accommodation, explicitly linking it to the realization of all human rights – civil, political, economic, social, cultural – and embedding it within the non-discrimination mandate. In so doing, the CRPD animates both theoretical as well as practical discussions about rendering all rights meaningful for some 650 million persons with disabilities worldwide. This chapter reviews the concept of reasonable accommodation as it is articulated in the CRPD, the human rights treaty where it makes its first appearance. This analysis is then set against the more timid manifestation of the reasonable accommodation duty in other human rights realms, including its application in the UN and regional human rights systems. The CRPD, it is hoped, will help enliven the reasonable accommodation duty and thereby give impetus for its further development in international as well as national human rights practice. This possibility, we argue, is genuine given the procedural mechanisms now in place for advancing disability discrimination and reasonable accommodation claims under the two new Optional Protocols to the CRPD and ICESCR respectively.

Keywords: disability, economic and social rights, international treaties, litigation

Suggested Citation

Lord, Janet and Brown, Rebecca, The Role of Reasonable Accommodation in Securing Substantive Equality for Persons with Disabilities: The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2010). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1618903 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1618903

Janet Lord

American University ( email )

4300 Nebraska Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20016
United States

Harvard University - Harvard Law School ( email )

1563 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.hpod.org

University of Maryland School of Law ( email )

Rebecca Brown (Contact Author)

International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net) ( email )

211 East 43rd Street, #906
New York, NY 10017
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
968
Abstract Views
3,373
Rank
43,987
PlumX Metrics