Which Entitlements and for Whom?

What is ‘disability’? Who are ‘persons with disabilities’? What entitlements are legitimate and relevant in relation to ‘disability’? The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), adopted by the UN in 2006, provides answers to these questions. The answers have a dual heritage: International human rights law on the one side, and different models of disability developed within disability research and activism on the other. In this study, Anna Bruce explores the CRPD and its ideological antecedents through a comparative analysis of this convention, the negotiations that preceded it, four different models of disability (ICIDH, the Social Model of Disability, ICF and the Minority Group Model of Disability), and critical points that have been made against these models. Through this comparison, Bruce illuminates central choices that were made in the negotiations and their effects for which entitlements are protected for whom, as well as the challenges facing the monitoring and implementation of the CRPD, with a particular focus on the right to health. There is an ambiguous relationship between the right to health in human rights law, and the model which had the strongest influence on the negotiations of the CRPD: the Social Model of Disability. This book shows that while there is considerable common ground between the CRPD and the Social Model of Disability, the former departs from the latter on central points, which has implications for the monitoring and implementation of the right to health. In conclusion, Bruce argues that the relationship between the Social Model of Disability and the right to health needs to be clarified in order for this right to materialise equally for the entire constituency of the CRPD. Anna Bruce is an international lawyer at Lund University. This book is her PhD dissertation.