Human Rights and Disability Advocacy. By Maya Sabatello and Marianne Schulze. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 304 pp. $59.95 cloth.

Abstract

Human Rights and Disability Advocacy. By Maya Sabatello and Marianne Schulze. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 304 pp. $59.95 cloth.The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (the Convention) which entered into force on May 3, 2008 has been hailed as marking a both in relation to how international human rights treaties are developed (from state-centric to participation by Disabled Persons' Organisations [DPOs] and Non-Governmental Organisations [NGOs]) and how international human rights law approaches disability (from medical model to social model) (see, e.g., Melish 2007). With 160 signatories and nearly 10 years having passed since the Convention was open for signature in May 2006, the Convention is now in a phase of domestic implementation and the international origins of the Convention and its paradigm shift might seem in relative terms a distant past. In Human Rights and Disability Advocacy editors Maya Sabatello and Marianne Shulze take readers back to the Convention's development via a series of first person reflections by individuals from a diverse range of DPOs and NGOs who were involved in the treaty negotiations.The book provides a useful complement to scholarship which takes a more abstract or formal approach to the Convention's development. In taking a first person approach from multiple perspectives rather than a single, chronological narrative the interplay of the chapters in Human Rights and Disability Advocacy form a bricolage that provides an enriching insight into the challenges, complexities, and tensions of international human rights advocacy and how these play out specifically in relation to human rights of people with disability. different authors in each chapter are unexpectedly candid and reflective of their first hand experiences-sharing successes as well as failures, disappointments, and disagreements-and together illuminate the complex lived, material, and affective dimensions of the development of international human rights law and specifically of the Convention.The multiperspectival narrative structure of Human Rights and Disability Advocacy provides important and unanticipated insights into the strategies and challenges of new diplomacy, including in relation to working in coalitions and lobbying states parties. For a legal readership, one chapter which is particularly valuable is Tara J. Melish's chapter on Disability Rights International's approach to the Convention drafting negotiations which was focused on achieving the goal of legal technical and operational effectiveness at international and domestic levels (as opposed to a focus on aspirational and concept driven goals) and careful, legal attention to international law principles in this strategy.This book will be of interest and use to disability legal and critical disability scholars and students because it poses provocative, material challenges to the theorizing of disability. While the editors of Human Rights and Disability Advocacy make the point that the approach to disability in the Convention owes much to theorizing on social models of disability, the chapters in Human Rights and Disability Advocacy implicitly show the converse: that the experiences of the individuals involved in the development of the Convention can in turn inform the further theorizing of disability as a political category. One of the fascinating themes to emerge from the book's structure and multiperspectival approach is the hierarchies, tensions and at times interesting alliances between different disability categories and groups of disabled people: summed up by MacQuarrie and Laurin-Bowie as: The negotiations of the [Convention] brought the world together to talk about disability. With that came stereotypes, assumptions, and outdated language use about disability - and not just from government delegations. ... the tensions and differences among and within civil society organizations were, in many ways, more difficult and more important to overcome than those between government delegations and civil society organizations (p. …