The Disabilities Convention: Human Rights of Persons with Disabilities or Disability Rights?

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is about more than making sure that existing human rights are applied to persons with disability. It also subtly reformulates and extends existing human rights to take into account the specific rights experience of persons with disability. In fact, the argument can be made that the Convention comes close to creating new rights, or at least very new ways of seeing common rights. This suggests a deeper point about the fragmentation of international human rights law and the increasingly recognized need to take into account the irreducibility of the experience of certain categories of persons. The Disabilities Convention has some interesting lessons to teach about human rights more generally.