A Tale of Disregard? Reception of the Jurisprudence of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities before the European Court of Human Rights

Abstract

The Convention on the Rights of Persons Disabilities (CRPD) was hailed as a transformative human rights treaty when it came into force in 2008. The CRPD not only promises the remediation of the under-protection of the rights of persons with disabilities in international human rights law, but it also aims to transform the deep and structural inequalities underpinning the governance of disability through law and policy. The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD Committee) has adopted and extended this transformative ethos in its jurisprudence. In this article, we examine the reception of this jurisprudence by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and ask whether and how the CRPD Committee's interpretation of the CRPD has influenced the case law of the ECtHR. By focusing on the right to legal capacity, accessibility and reasonable accommodation, we demonstrate that the transformative jurisprudence of the CRPD Committee was met with visible disregard in Strasbourg. Our findings point to both the importance of specialized human rights treaties and jurisprudence in advancing the rights of historically discriminated groups and the challenges of judicially diffusing transformative protections for the rights of persons with disabilities into general human rights law.