More can still be done for persons with disabilities

e Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities reflects the shift that has taken place in the way disability and persons with disabilities are seen.

Historically, disability was seen a personal condition residing in the individual. As an individual deficit, the status of “being disabled.” It was viewed as the natural cause for some people being unable to attend a regular school, get a job or participate in social life. But when disability is perceived in this way, society’s responses are restricted to applying one-sided approaches like medical intervention or they are committed to charity or welfare programmes. According to this old model, the rights, choices, and even preferences of people with disabilities are disregarded. eir lives are handed over to professionals who control fundamental decisions such as where they will go to school, what support they will receive and where they will live. Over the past few decades, there has been an important change in the way disability is understood. e focus is no longer on what is wrong with the person. Instead, disability is recognised as the consequence of the interaction of the individual with an environment that does not accommodate that individual’s differences and limits or impedes the individual’s participation in society. is approach is referred to as the social model of disability. e Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities endorses this model and takes it forward by explicitly recognising disability as a human rights issue. From this perspective, the social, legal, economic, political and environmental conditions that act as barriers to the full exercise of rights by persons with disabilities need to be identified and overcome. For example, their marginalisation and their exclusion from education are not the result of their inability to learn but of insufficient teacher trainer or inaccessible classrooms; their exclusion from the labour market might be due to a lack of transport to the workplace or negative attitudes among employers and colleagues that a person with disabilities is unable to work; and their inability to participate in public affairs might result from the lack of electoral material in accessible to persons with disabilities. Viewing disability from a human rights perspective involves an evolution in thinking and acting by states and all sectors of society so that persons with disabilities are no longer considered to be recipients of charity or objectives of other people’s decisions but holders of rights. A rights-based approach seeks ways to respect, support and celebrate human diversity by creating the conditions that allow meaningful participation by a wide range of persons, including persons with disabilities. Protecting and promoting their rights is not only about providing disability-related services. It is about adopting measures to change attitudes and behaviours that stigmatise and marginalise persons with disabilities. It is also about putting in place policies, laws and programmes that remove barriers and guarantee the exercise of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights by persons with disabilities.To achieve a genuine exercise of rights, programmes, awareness-raising and social support are necessary to change the way society operates and to dismantle the barriers that prevent persons with disabilities from participating fully in society. I know this is cliché but disability is really never an inability. It is high time we view persons with disability from the perspective of their abilities.