Online Mental Disability Law Education, a Disability Rights Tribunal and the Creation of an Asian Disability Law Database: Their Impact on Research, Training and Teaching of Law, Criminology and Criminal Justice in Asia

Abstract

Two professors at New York Law School (NYLS) and the director of the Tokyo Advocacy Law Office are engaged in initiatives with the potential to have major influences on the study of law, criminology and criminal justice: the creation of a Disability Rights Tribunal for Asia and the Pacific (DRTAP) and expansion of NYLS’s online mental disability law programme (OMDLP) to include numerous Asian venues. DRTAP seeks to create a sub-regional body (a Commission and eventually a Court) to hear violations of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This will explicitly inspire scholarship about issues such as treatment of forensic patients, relationships between mental disability enforcement and criminal law enforcement, and connections between mental disability and criminal procedure. NYLS’s OMDLP offers thirteen valuable courses to criminologists and criminal justice scholars and will host DRICAP (Disability Rights Information Center for Asia and the Pacific), providing Internet access to important disability rights developments from ten nations in the Asia/Pacific region. This partnership offers unrivalled knowledge in criminal justice and mental disability law. Our article will detail and explain how these programmes train, teach and foster new research, distinctively benefiting Asia’s legal/advocacy/criminology/criminal justice communities.