The Right To Inclusive Education In International Human Rights Law

This volume studies the implications of the right to inclusive education in human rights law for disability law, policy and practice.

This book describes how human rights safeguards should be applied in education. Its point of departure is the fact that education can - and does - violate human rights, notably when it is imposed upon the indigenous or minorities so as to obliterate their identity. Human rights are defined as safeguards against abuse of power, whose counterpart are governmental human rights obligations. These are to make education available, accessible, acceptable and adaptable, hence the 4-A scheme. The purpose of human rights work is to expose and oppose abuses of power. They can be detected in the very design of education strategies. Defining availability of primary education as a development target, removed into distant future, negates the right to education and the corresponding governmental obligations, individual and collective. The book uses examples from different regions to describe safeguards that are necessary to transform political promises into legal obligations. Where education is available, access may be conditioned by purchasing power rather than defined as a human right. Denials of the right to education include discriminat!ionagainst non-citizens or girls. They demonstrate the crucial import of human rights, the need to differentiate between poverty- and policy-based exclusion from education. Acceptability of education entails ensuring that education does not violate human rights and is worthy of its name. Typical human rights cases have challenged, in all corners of the world, the language of instruction, censorship of textbooks or harassment of teachers for introducing human rights education. Also, human rights challenges are epitomized in the requirement to adapt education to the learners, to recognize them as subjects of rights. On the micro-level, adapting education to children with disabilities has triggered human rights challenges world-wide. On the macro-level, adaptability tackles the very design of education. Graduate unemployment illustrates shortcomings of treating education as a self-contained sector as do choices between public and private, secular and religious, segregated andall-inclusive education. The book is published by Wolf Legal Publishers, jointly with the European Association for Education Law and Policy. Katarina Tomasevski was Professor of International Law and International Relations at Lund University (Sweden) and, from 1998-2004, she was Special Rapporteur on the right to education of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. The book draws on her experience in carrying out country mission!s incountries as different as the People's Republic of China and United States of America, and facilitating redress for human rights violations in education world-wide. http: //www.tomasevski.net

The adoption of the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CPRD) by the United Nations in 2006 is the first comprehensive and binding treaty on the rights of people with disabilities. It establishes the right of people with disabilities to equality, dignity, autonomy, full participation, as well as the right to live in the community, and the right to supported decision-making and inclusive education. Prior to the CRPD, international law had provided only limited protections to people with disabilities. This book analyses the development of disability rights as an international human rights movement. Focusing on the United States and countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East the book examines the status of people with disabilities under international law prior to the adoption of the CPRD, and follows the development of human rights protections through the convention’s drafting process. Arlene Kanter argues that by including both new applications and entirely new approaches to human rights treaty enforcement, the CRPD is significant not only to people with disabilities but also to the general development of international human rights, by offering new human rights protections for all people. Taking a comparative perspective, the book explores how the success of the CRPD in achieving protections depends on the extent to which individual countries enforce domestic laws and policies, and the changing public attitudes towards people with disabilities. This book will be of excellent use and interest to researchers and students of human rights law, discrimination, and disability studies.

This book examines what international human rights law has gained from the new elements in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). It explores how the CRPD is intricately bound up with other international instruments by studying the relationship between the Convention rights and those protected by other human rights treaties, as well as the overall objectives of the UN. Using a social model lens on disability, the book shows how the Convention sheds new light on the very notion of human rights. The book provides a theoretical framework which explicitly integrates disability into international human rights law. It explains how the CRPD challenges the legal subject by drawing attention to distinct forms of embodiment, before introducing the idea of the 'dis-abled subject', which stems from a recognition that all individuals encounter disability-related issues during their lives. The book also shows how to apply this theoretical framework to several rights and highlights the consequences for the implementation of human rights treaties as a whole. It builds upon the literature of disability studies and legal and political theory, as well as drawing upon the recommendations of treaty bodies and reports of UN agencies and disabled people's organisations. This book thereby provides an agenda-setting analysis for all human rights experts, by showing the benefits of placing disabled people at the heart of international human rights law.

In view of the trend of demoting education from "human right" to "human need", this book seeks to affirm education as a "human right" and to describe the various state duties flowing from the right to education, by systematically analyzing article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

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

This book examines what international human rights law has gained from the new elements in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). It explores how the CRPD is intricately bound up with other international instruments by studying the relationship between the Convention rights and those protected by other human rights treaties, as well as the overall objectives of the UN. Using a social model lens on disability, the book shows how the Convention sheds new light on the very notion of human rights. The book provides a theoretical framework which explicitly integrates disability into international human rights law. It explains how the CRPD challenges the legal subject by drawing attention to distinct forms of embodiment, before introducing the idea of the 'dis-abled subject', which stems from a recognition that all individuals encounter disability-related issues during their lives. The book also shows how to apply this theoretical framework to several rights and highlights the consequences for the implementation of human rights treaties as a whole. It builds upon the literature of disability studies and legal and political theory, as well as drawing upon the recommendations of treaty bodies and reports of UN agencies and disabled people's organisations. This book thereby provides an agenda-setting analysis for all human rights experts, by showing the benefits of placing disabled people at the heart of international human rights law.