Legal Capacity, Disability and Human Rights

Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognises the equal right to exercise legal capacity without discrimination based on disability, and obliges state parties to ensure access to the support a person may require in exercising it. Since its adoption, there has been a growing body of work by the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, domestic and human rights courts, legal and policy researchers and civil society activists critically examining laws which restrict or remove the exercise of legal capacity based on disability. Traditionally, this work has focused on constitutional and legal standards regulating the exercise of legal capacity – guardianship or substitute decision making laws and mental health laws. However, reforming legal capacity seems to be an all-encompassing enterprise, which requires deeper attention to be paid to its historical, social and legal foundations, as well as the wide array of institutions that it permeates and their internal coherence.

NICOLÁ S ESPEJO-YAKSIC is Researcher at the Centre for Constitutional Studies of the Supreme Court Justice, Mexico, Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, University of Oxford, Guest Lecturer in Law at the University of Leiden and Corresponding Member of the Cambridge Family Law Centre at the University of Cambridge. He is also Chair of the International Network on Constitutional Family Law (INCFL) and has served as advisor for the United Nations. He has researched and published in the fields of children’ s rights in theory and practice, international human rights, family law, disability and compara MICHAEL BACH is Managing Director of the Institute for Research and Development on Inclusion and Society (IRIS), Adjunct Professor at the School of Disability Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University and was a Fellow at the Open Society Foundations, during which he conducted research on key concepts on which this collection is based, and convened with many of the authors. He has a PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies from the University of Toronto and has undertaken legal and policy research on disability rights, as well as published numerous professional papers, articles and books in this area