Introduction to Disability, Rights and Law Reform in Australia: Pushing Beyond Legal Futures

Abstract

The United Nations 'Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities' (CRPD), which entered into force in May 2008, has been hailed by disability rights scholars and activists as effecting monumental shifts in the status of people with disability under international human rights law. A key reason is that the CRPD embodies a 'social model' understanding of disability, focused on systemic factors and barriers to equality, that is in contrast to the earlier reductive, individualised 'medical models' of disability apparent in international human rights law that legitimated differential treatment of people with disability on the basis of their purported internal, pathological deficits. Some ..