Disability Rights and Citizenship

Abstract

Are citizenship and human rights effective tools to overcoming barriers and obstacles to societal membership for people with disabilities? This chapter investigates persistent barriers to social and political participation experienced by people with disabilities in spite of citizenship and human rights they possess. Through an appraisal of historical literature on citizenship and its conceptualization as a bundle of civil, political, and social rights that are interrelated and interdependent, this chapter examines citizenship as a foundation to the UN’s notion of human rights and its contemporary application to disability-rights issues. It examines whether and how rights have become important tools to producing social change for people with disabilities, as well as the problem of decoupling of disability rights, when a national government ratifies a human-rights treaty but fails to implement it at home. This chapter asks whether rights and their use by disability-rights movements foster citizenship and societal membership. It concludes with a discussion of new approaches to overcoming barriers that people with disabilities experience in participating in society.