Inaccessible Environments as Inhumane and Degrading: Deconstructing Price V United Kingdom (2001) Implications for (Re)Reading Sri Lankan Disability Law

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to inject enthusiasm into the paradox of inaccessibility and the promotion of accessible environments through revisiting the impact of social exclusion and inaccessibility in the lives of disabled people. I undertake this rethinking of the inaccessibility question theoretically and jurisprudentially. My approach is to turn towards a ground breaking, albeit 11 year old European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) case Price v United Kingdom (2001). I tease out the reasoning of this novel judgment and assess its possible application in other jurisdictions and social contexts. This paper discusses the ways that the court negotiates the matter of onto-violence experienced by a disabled woman in a particular space (a police cell and later prison hospital). Core to my analysis is the notion that society is governed by ableist relations that view civil society and civil(ized) environments on the basis of a particular reified citizenship – he who is young, abled bodied male and free. I unpack and explore the impact of those ableist relations in causing the arising of daily experiences of micro aggression and consequential internalized ableism.

Disability jurisprudence is an emerging field in disability studies and this paper explores the novel form of argumentation adopted in Price to rethink the ways that law can provide a remedy for particularized social exclusion and the reframing of the parameters of the tolerance that associates inaccessibility as a form of microaggression. The paper is interdisciplinary in the sense that it is a conversation that brings together sociology, psychology, geography, disability studies and of course law, in dialogue to create an imaginary about the causation of social injury (onto violence) of inaccessible environments and imaginary possibilities for the establishment of legal norms that center and thus validate disabled peoples experiences, resulting in the cessation of not just onto-violence at the level of individual disabled people but also cessation systemically through the inauguration of anticipatory standards that are mindful of the diversity of communitarian life.

In Part I of the paper I begin with a context discussion on the nature of social exclusion and then move to a conversation about experiencing onto-violence. In particular I unfold the concepts of microaggression, disability narcissism and internalized ableism to reveal the profound and accumulative consequences of inaccessibility beyond mere; albeit significant deprivation of access. Part II turns to human rights law, to the (ECtHR) case Price v United Kingdom (2001), in the form of a case analysis and then considers the judgment and its consequences for the reading of potential Sri Lankan approaches to disability jurisprudence through the lens of the Fundamental Rights provisions in the 1978 Constitution.

Keywords: disability law, Sri Lankan law, disability access, Sri Lankan Constitution, human rights