It Takes a Treaty: Elbowing into the Mainstream Human Rights Movement.

During the past 10 years, organizations of disabled persons around the world have come to see the international human rights framework as a strategic conveyor of the core ideas of a new, social model of disability. The human rights framing of disability positions people with disabilities as rights-holders, thereby discrediting medical/charity models of disability wherein people with disabilities are classified as sick people in need of a cure or handouts. This challenges the disability movement to equip its constituency to become active claimants of their rights. At the same time, the disability community faces the challenge of becoming claimants who are effectively embraced within the mainstream human rights movement. Here, the challenges are many, and the strategies of so doing are highly contested within the disability movement. This paper explores the origins of the shift to a rights-based approach within the international disability movement and examines the challenges that this refocus presents. It analyzes the conscious adoption of a rights-based approach to disability advocacy by organizations engaged in an emerging transnational advocacy network on disability and assesses both internal and external pressures related to this development. In so doing, the paper contributes to the critique that questions the human rights movement?s receptivity to new areas of standard-setting and challenges the hegemony of civil and political rights that prevails in mainstream human rights practice. Within this context, this paper provides an important case study of a much neglected but increasingly visible human rights issue area, offering some preliminary observations and suggestions for deepening the constructivist analysis of non-state actors in the progressive development of international human rights law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]