Legal protection of adults, guardianship, and court-appointed legal - PDF document

Legal protection of adults, guardianship, and court-appointed legal representation (Betreuung) from a perspective of human rights and disability Presentation by Prof. Dr. Theresia Degener at the 4th World Congress on Adult Guardianship 14-16 September 2016 ( Translation from German: Ekpenyong Ani) I want to thank the hosts of the 4 th World Congress for inviting me and I gladly accepted the invitation. 1. Introduction In many respects, the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities represents an advancement of the international protection of human rights. For one, the UN CRPD is one of the sources of modern international law which has introduced national monitoring as a new instrument for implementing and monitoring human rights. Secondly, the EU as a regional organization was able to accede to a human rights convention for the first time and has been a member of the UN CRPD since 2010. As a third example let me mention the conflation of development cooperation and human rights policy which has found its expression in the UN CRPD as in no other core human rights instrument of the United Nations. The list of innovations that were adopted with the UN CRPD could be extended. It is not surprising that the UN CRPD has an impact on international and national law or rather poses new reform challenges. After all, looking ahead, envisioning the future, is the ratio legis of any human rights convention. If there is no need for change, there is no need for a new human rights covenant. Human rights are the normative response to collective experiences of injustice. In order to overcome collective experiences of injustice, values and norms are needed that transcend what is already in place, subjective rights are needed that enable those that have been abused to defend their human dignity as persons. Human rights instruments always serve social transformation. They always premise a transformation in social attitudes and are intended to initiate further changes. This becomes apparent in the history of international human rights in the United Nations. For instance the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) was developed through the process of decolonization in the 1960s and advanced the interrogation of racism all over the world. With the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) , the international women’s movement introduced the issue of gender equality into international and national politics. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) challenged outdated concepts of parent al authority and children’s legal incapacity. Especially the human rights conventions adopted at the end of the 20 th century became increasingly specific in focusing on individual groups of people. In international law this process is termed the pluralization or personification of human rights. This is based on the realization that the mothers and fathers of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights only had a very one- dimensional idea of the individual as a legal entity. You could also say, the prototype of a legal entity was a white, healthy, European man. The circumstances of people of color, people

of different ethnical backgrounds, of women, of children, were not part of the concept. Human rights w ere Eurocentric men’s rights. Only the di fferent social movements changed this concept of human rights. With the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities the disability rights movement fought for and attained a place at the table of human rights. This has led disability issues out of the one-way street of care and charity. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is to replace the medical model of disability by the human rights model of disability. Underlying this is more than a critique of medicine or therapy and rehabilitation. Besides criticizing the medical model of disability as a one-dimensional, essentialist reduction of disability to a deficient state of health, the human rights model of disability is aimed at a new understanding of fundamental concepts such as discrimination, autonomy, and solidarity. The definition of discrimination within international law is expanded by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Not only any distinction, exclusion or limitation because of disability aimed at or resulting in a violation or obstruction of human rights is regarded as discrimination. Also the so-called “denial of reasonable accommodation” is considered to be discrimination due to disability. This refers to the refusal to eliminate barriers, be they of physical or communicative nature. For instance, access that is only possible via stairs, information only available in normal print or spoken language, or in a language difficult to understand. For example the fact that there are no sign language interpreters at this conference means that deaf people are excluded. The circumstance that no speech-to-text interpreters have been deployed creates barriers for those people that depend on following the discussion by reading in order to understand. The same applies to a translation into Easy to Read- language. Codifying the denial of reasonable accommodation as a new form of discrimination means having a concept of equality that focuses on the needs of all people as equally important needs, taking them into consideration when allocating resources in the process of planning. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities also changes the concept of autonomy. Autonomy no longer means freedom only for certain people who are part of the mainstream. In the sense of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities autonomy not only means the right to be left alone in order to enjoy private freedom independently and autarchically. In the sense of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities autonomy above all means the freedom t o make one’s own decisions, even if I should need support in the process. Autonomy in the sense of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is no longer foreclosed or limited when I don’t fulfill a certain criterion of reason or health. Autonomy in the sense of the human rights model of disability means recognizing and respecting decisions and ways of behavior that do not necessarily conform to the norm. Actually this concept of autonomy is not exactly new. After all, feminist theory has long uncovered that the idea of the self-sufficient person making decisions in complete isolation is an illusion. No one makes important decisions alone and without support. Whether we want to get married, buy a house, have children or not, prepare a goose or fish for Christmas, whether we apply for this job or the other, whether we make use of this medical therapy or another – always and everywhere will we consult with people from our