The Routledge International Handbook of Disability Human Rights Hierarchies

Description

Disability is defined by hierarchy. Regardless of culture or context, persons with disabilities are almost always pushed to the bottom of the social hierarchy. With the advent of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), disability human rights seemingly provided a path forward for tearing down ableist social hierarchies and ensuring that all persons with disabilities everywhere were treated equally. Despite important progress, the disability human rights project not only remains incomplete but has also created new hierarchies among persons with disabilities themselves or across the human rights it promotes. Certain groups of persons with disabilities have gained new voices while others remain silenced, and certain rights are prioritized over others, depending on what states, international organizations, or advocates want rather than what those on the ground need most. This volume was inspired by the continued need both to expose human rights violations against persons with disabilities and to explore the nuanced role that hierarchies play in the spread, implementation, and protection of disability human rights. The enjoyment of human rights is not equal nor is the recognition of specific individual and group rights. In order to change this situation, inequalities across the disability human rights movement must be explored. Divided into five parts: Who counts as disabled? Political, social, and cultural context, Which rights on top, whose rights on the bottom? Pushed to the periphery of the disability rights movement, Containing representations of disability comprising 34 newly written chapters including case studies from the Anglophone Caribbean, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, China, Ghana, Haiti, Hungary, India, Israel, Kenya, Latin America, Poland, Russia, Scotland, Serbia and South Africa, and other countries, this book will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, human rights law, and social policy.