Abstract
How is Nigeria’s failure to fulfil its obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to be appreciated or even resolved? Answers to this are sought through a seminal criticism of human rights, namely, Simone Weil’s 1942 essay Human Personality. Weil questioned the ability of human rights concepts to cause the powerful to develop the emotional dispositions of empathy for those who suffer. Weil’s insights provide a convincing explanation that the indifference of Nigerian authorities towards the Convention may be accounted for by the weakness of human rights discourse to foster human capacity for empathy and care for those who suffer. Weil’s criticisms will serve as a point of departure for a particular way to circumvent this inadequacy of human rights discourse to achieve disability justice in Nigeria through other means. I argue that Weil, through her concept of attention, grappled with and offers a consciousness of suffering and vulnerability that is not only uncommon to existing juridical human rights approaches, but is achievable through the active participation in the very forms of suffering and vulnerability in which amelioration is sought. To provide empirical content to this argument, I turn to a short-lived initiative of the Nigerian disability movement, which if ethico-politically refined and widely applied, can supply an action-theoretical grounding for and be combined with Weil’s work to elevate agitations for disability justice above human rights to the realm of human obligations.
Highlights
The disparity between Nigeria’s ratification and implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is an invitation to reassess the efficacy or even the value of the ways in which those in positions of authority internalise human rights norms
To begin to see how attention can revitalise the practice of disability simulations generally and in Nigeria it is sensible to conclude this section by considering what Weil means by obligations, to understand their inexplicable link to attention, and why they, not human rights, should assume primacy in the debate about disability justice
While the human rights literature on social change treats this as a problem of internalising human rights norms, the conclusions that can be drawn from Weil’s writings suggest that the problem is more fundamental than what appears in the literature
Summary
The disparity between Nigeria’s ratification and implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is an invitation to reassess the efficacy or even the value of the ways in which those in positions of authority internalise human rights norms. I argue that Weil’s criticisms of human rights together with her concept of attention can provide a different philosophical basis for the pursuit of disability justice in Nigeria.
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