Emerging trends in disability anti-discrimination law in Europe

Abstract

For more than two decades, a dynamic body of law on disability-based discrimination has been emerging in the European sphere, encompassing both the European Union (EU) and Council of Europe. This body of law has been influenced by the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2006, whose embrace of a social-contextual model of disability marked a paradigm shift in how disability equality was conceptualized at the international level. The CRPD has played a particularly important role in facilitating the emergence of growing synergies between EU and European Convention on Human Rights disability equality law. This chapter analyses the extent to which the jurisprudence of the Luxembourg and Strasbourg Courts has been influenced by the CRPD, and examines how this may develop further in the future.