Article 20 [Personal Mobility]

Abstract

The CRPD was adopted by the UNGA on December 13, 2006, and entered into force on May 3, 2008, together with its Optional Protocol. The Convention is the first UN human rights treaty to be adopted in the twenty-first century and is reputed to be the most rapidly negotiated ever. The CRPD aspires “to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity” (Art. 1) and marks a turning point in the approach toward disabilities. Indeed, since its adoption, it has played a vanguard role as to the promotion and protection of disability rights, as well as a driving force toward legal change at national level, including the EU level. From the first perspective, the CRPD has not only rapidly become part of the international anti-discrimination law framework, but it has also given a fundamental contribution in the acknowledgement that disability has to be seen as an evolving concept resulting “from the interaction between person with impairments and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinders their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others” and that the focus of this notion has to be centered not only on individual impairments but mainly on the barriers to participation. The CRPD, in sum, has contributed to a dramatic cultural shift of the approach towards disabilities from the so-called medical model, according to which it is the impairment itself that causes the limitation, to a social model of disability, according to which the experience of disability has to be located in the social environment rather than in the impairment. The social model to disability carries with it the inference that problems of disability have to be located squarely within society. Under this model, it is not individual limitations that are the cause of the problem but society’s failure to provide appropriate services and adequately ensure that the needs of persons with disabilities are fully taken into account in its social organization. The application of a right-based approach to disability has paved the way to the acknowledgment of the centrality of the principle of accessibility, one of the three pillars of the CRPD, in the mechanism of protection set forth by the Convention and of the pivotal role played by the right to personal mobility enshrined in Article 20.