This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Disability Human Rights Law" that was published in Laws

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.

The World Report on Disability suggests more than a billion people totally experience disability. They generally have poorer health, lower education and fewer economic opportunities and higher rates of poverty than people without disabilities. This report provides the best available evidence about what works to overcome barriers to better care and services.

The United Nations' Decade of Disabled Persons has served as a time for standard setting in the field of human rights and disability, and has created the need to evaluate the relevant human rights instruments for disabled persons. This volume responds to this need by offering a collection of essays on the subject of human rights and disability, and an extensive compilation of international and regional human rights instruments, guidelines and principles which are of special relevance to disabled people. It should serve organizations of disabled people as well as governments throughout the world as a resource and as an introduction to human rights and disability. This shortcoming may be one reason for the widely prevailing notion that disability is a welfare issue rather than a human rights issue.

This book provides a concise guide to international disability law. It analyses the case law of the CRPD Committee and other international human rights treaty bodies, and provides commentaries on more than 50 leading cases. The author elaborates on the obligations of States Parties under the CRPD and other international treaties, while also spelling out the rights of persons with disabilities, and the different mechanisms that exist at both domestic and international levels for ensuring that those rights are respected, protected and promoted. The author also delineates the traditional differentiation between civil and political rights on the one hand, and economic, social and cultural rights on the other. He demonstrates, through analysis of the evolving case law, how the gap between these two sets of rights is gradually closing. The result is a powerful tool for political decisionmakers, academics, legal practitioners, law students, persons with disabilities and their representative organisations, human rights activists and general readers.

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year for Nonfiction "...an essential and engaging look at recent disability history."— Buzzfeed One of the most influential disability rights activists in US history tells her personal story of fighting for the right to receive an education, have a job, and just be human. A story of fighting to belong in a world that wasn’t built for all of us and of one woman’s activism—from the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco to inside the halls of Washington—Being Heumann recounts Judy Heumann’s lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society. Paralyzed from polio at eighteen months, Judy’s struggle for equality began early in life. From fighting to attend grade school after being described as a “fire hazard” to later winning a lawsuit against the New York City school system for denying her a teacher’s license because of her paralysis, Judy’s actions set a precedent that fundamentally improved rights for disabled people. As a young woman, Judy rolled her wheelchair through the doors of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco as a leader of the Section 504 Sit-In, the longest takeover of a governmental building in US history. Working with a community of over 150 disabled activists and allies, Judy successfully pressured the Carter administration to implement protections for disabled peoples’ rights, sparking a national movement and leading to the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Candid, intimate, and irreverent, Judy Heumann’s memoir about resistance to exclusion invites readers to imagine and make real a world in which we all belong.