A book such as this both demonstrates the progress that has been made over recent years, and will also serve to enhance respect for the human rights of persons with intellectual disabilities in the years to come.' - From the Foreword by Orville Endicott This wide-ranging volume provides a multidisciplinary examination of human rights and the lives of people with intellectual disabilities. The book combines historical, psychological, philosophical, social, educational, medical and legal perspectives to form a unique and insightful account of the subject. Initial chapters explain the historical context of rights for people with intellectual disabilities, including the right to life, and propose a conceptual framework to inform contemporary practice. Contributors then explore the many theoretical and practical challenges that people with intellectual disabilities face, in exercising their civil rights, educational rights or participatory rights, for instance. The implications arising from these issues are identified and practical guidelines for support and accommodation are provided. This book will be an essential resource for practitioners, advocates, lawyers, policy-makers and students on disability courses.

This work combines historical, psychological, philosophical, social, educational, medical and legal perspectives to form an insightful account of the challenges to the human rights of people with intellectual disabilities.

Inequality: Marcia H. Rioux

The formerly established medically-based idea of disability, with its charity-based approach to treatment and services, is being replaced by a human rights-based approach in which people with impairments are no longer considered medical problems, totally dependent on the beneficence of non-impaired people in society, but have fundamental rights to support, inclusion, and participation. This interdisciplinary book examines the diverse concerns that people with impairments face in the context of human rights, provides insights into new developments on important issues relating human rights to disability, and features new approaches and solutions to vital problems in the current debate.

Disability studies scholars and activists have long criticized and critiqued so-termed ’charitable’ approaches to disability where the capitalization of individual disabled bodies to invoke pity are historically, socially, and politically circumscribed by paternalism. Disabled individuals have long advocated for civil and human rights in various locations throughout the globe, yet contemporary human rights discourses problematically co-opt disabled bodies as ’evidence’ of harms done under capitalism, war, and other forms of conflict, while humanitarian non-governmental organizations often use disabled bodies to generate resources for their humanitarian projects. It is the connection between civil rights and human rights, and this concomitant relationship between national and global, which foregrounds this groundbreaking book’s contention that disability studies productively challenge such human rights paradigms, which troublingly eschew disability rights in favor of exclusionary humanitarianism. It relocates disability from the margins to the center of academic and activist debates over the vexed relationship between human rights and humanitarianism. These considerations thus productively destabilize able-bodied assumptions that undergird definitions of personhood in civil rights and human rights by highlighting intersections between disability, race, gender ethnicity, and sexuality as a way to interrogate the possibilities (and limitations) of human rights as a politicized regime.

This book examines the role of disability in the right to political and social participation, an act of citizenship that many disabled people do not enjoy. The disability rights movement does not accept the use of disability to create limits on citizenship, which poses challenges for contemporary societies that will become ever greater as the science and technology of enhancing human abilities evolves. Comprised of eight chapters, three interludes, and a postscript written by leading scholars and disability rights activists, the book explores citizenship for people with disabilities from an interdisciplinary perspective using the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) as a point of departure and the concept of universal design as a strategy for actualizing full citizenship for all. Situating disability in its historical and cultural contexts, the authors offer directions for rethinking citizenship, including implications for access to the built environment, information and communication systems, education, work, community life and politics. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students working in disability studies, planning, architecture, public health, rehabilitation, social work, and education.

This book develops a legal argument as to how persons with intellectual disability can flourish in a liberal setting through the exercise of human rights, even though they are perceived as non-autonomous. Using Ronald Dworkin's theory of liberal equality, it argues that ethical individualism can be modified to accommodate persons with intellectual disability as equals in liberal theory. Current legal practices, the case law of the ECtHR on disability, the provisions of the UNCRPD and a comparative analysis of English and German law are discussed, as well as suggestions for positive measures for persons with intellectual disability. The book will interest academics, human rights activists and legal practitioners in the field of disability rights.

The Training Guide is for facilitators of training courses on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol who are already familiar with the international human rights system. The Convention challenges customs and behavior based on stereotypes, prejudices, harmful practices and stigma relating to persons with disabilities, and promotes their full participation in all spheres of life. It is already applicable in 137 countries around the world. The Training Guide's methodology is interactive and promotes a participatory approach. Its modules can be used to develop tailored training courses to meet the needs of specific audiences (government officials, health professionals, civil society, employers' organizations, etc.). It is also helpful as a general information resource on the Convention and its Optional Protocol.

Human Rights and Disability Advocacy brings together perspectives from civil society representatives who played key roles in the drafting of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, shedding light on the emergent practices of a "new diplomacy" and the larger enterprise of human rights advocacy at the international level.

This book examines how intellectual disability is affected by stigma and how this stigma has developed. Around two per cent of the world's population have an intellectual disability but their low visibility in many places bears witness to their continuing exclusion from society. This prejudice has an impact on the family of those with an intellectual disability as well as the individual themselves and affects the well-being and life chances of all those involved. This book provides a framework for tackling intellectual disability stigma in institutional processes, media representations and other, less overt, settings. It also highlights the anti-stigma interventions which are already in place and the central role that self-advocacy must play.