New Zealand Rehabilitation Association, Inc.

Human rights in the disability context are usually viewed in terms of the rights (or lack of rights) of people with disabilities to experience the same kind of treatment and respect given to people without disabilities (see for example Martin Sullivan's experience of visiting Boston or Wendy Wicks' description of the Convention for the Rights of People with Disabilities). These are 'anti-discriminative' type rights, in the sense that people with disabilities are entitled, like everyone else, to enjoy the rights set out originally by the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and more specifically, for people with disabilities, in the Convention for the Rights of people with Disabilities (2006). There are other interesting ways to think about human rights and disability. Richard Siegert (2010) has argued that restoration of human rights to people with disabilities following injury or illness can be seen as one of the objectives of rehabilitation. He employs a model of human rights that has the values of 'freedom' and 'well-being' at their core. These lead to more concrete 'objects' that constitute rights: . Rehabilitation is able to restore rights that may have been lost or diminished as a result of ill-health. In a sense, human rights can be seen as a key outcome of successful rehabilitation. There is another way to consider human rights in the context of disability. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits". Amongst other human rights articulated by the Declaration, this strongly suggests that participation in ordinary community life is a fundamental human right and that exclusion is a breach of those rights. If we consider disability to be located within societal failure to accommodate to people with impairment, rather than located within individuals with impairment (the social model of disability), and define disability as restrictions in community participation of differently abled people, due to barriers imposed by the way society conducts itself, then it follows that disability is actually synonymous with a breach in the human right to full community participation. This certainly does not imply that we have right to perfect health. Disability and health can be related but are clearly not the same thing. What is implied though, is that society needs to make much more effort to minimise disability, not just to accord people with disabilities the same human rights as everyone else. This does not mean just considering environmental barriers in my view, but includes access to rehabilitation services and technologies that aim to improve peoples' autonomy and participation in their communities. When rehabilition is defined as a process that aims to accomplish these kinds of outcomes, rather than being concerned with improving impairments, then it follows that there is also a "right to rehabilitation". This concept has also been promoted by Rehabilitation International through Disability World bimonthly web-zine, although they come at it from a slightly different angle.