The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2006 to encourage the development of international and domestic legal protections for people with disabilities. Over the past sixteen years, 184 countries have ratified the CRPD, and more than one hundred countries have submitted their country reports to the CRPD Committee for review. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recently released a set of human rights indicators to measure states parties’ progress toward compliance with the CRPD. This essay discusses the potential benefits and limitations of the new CRPD Indicators. Despite their limitations, the CRPD Indicators may become an important catalyst for states parties’ compliance with the CRPD as well as a way to substantiate claims of violations of international, regional, and domestic law and crimes against humanity, such as those discussed in the lead article, Disability, Human Rights Violations, and Crimes Against Humanity.

Pons, Lord, and Stein's article entitled “Disability, Human Rights Violations, and Crimes Against Humanity,” offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of the necessity to legally frame and approach crimes against persons with disabilities across the globe as crimes against humanity (CAH). National public inquiries examining the systematic violations against persons with disabilities repeatedly demonstrate how, despite efforts to report such heinous crimes, these violations remain largely ignored and nearly always unprosecuted. In the Global South and East, violations may be accentuated as complex historical, economic, (geo)political, cultural, ideological, spiritual, and even religious beliefs come into play alongside shifting landscapes of civil unrest, war, and state militarization. Within such contexts, legal measures for the protection of persons with disabilities, particularly for minority communities, meet extraordinary barriers. In this essay, we identify a number of core issues that constrain the possibilities of investigation and prosecution of CAH committed against persons with disabilities living in the Global South and East. Even though such laws are largely grounded in practices and institutions of the Global North, this essay emphasizes the need to ensure that accountability efforts for CAH perpetrated against persons with disability are rigorous in their design, robust in their application, and recognize the heterogeneity of persons with disability on a global scale.

As international criminal lawyers and diplomats discuss the Draft Treaty on Crimes Against Humanity on the one hand, and the potential of adding a fifth crime, ecocide, to the Rome Statute on the other, Janet Lord, William Pons, and Michael Stein issue a well-timed and compelling call to demonstrate our understanding that people with disabilities (PWD) are a part of humanity. The authors map the many crimes and various situations in which PWD have been and continue to be specifically targeted, and persuasively argue that it is past time for the system of international criminal law to embrace prosecutions of crimes against PWD. In so doing, the authors make a series of important recommendations for international criminal law: for example, that international criminal processes must be made fully accessible to PWD. This essay offers three reflections on the authors’ call to use international criminal prosecutions, specifically at the International Criminal Court (ICC), to elevate the rights of PWD, centering around the following questions: (1) do the people of the world believe that disabled lives matter; (2) if they do not, might international criminal law help shape domestic laws and overcome ableism; and, relatedly, (3) can the ICC create the necessary change? Or put another way, how capacious can and should the category of “crimes against humanity” be since institutional credibility and longevity are concerns?

This essay examines how EU criminal law, which regulates certain aspects of criminal procedural law of the twenty-seven EU member states, addresses the situation of persons with disabilities who come into contact with the criminal justice system. EU law on victims and on suspects and accused persons (partially) addresses disability through the prism of “vulnerability.” This essay argues that associating persons with disabilities with “vulnerability” can be stigmatizing. Moreover, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which requires that persons with disabilities have effective access to justice and receive appropriate accommodations, does not link these rights to a prior recognition of “vulnerability.” Even though the EU is a party to the CRPD, the 2013 Recommendation from the European Commission on Procedural Safeguards for Vulnerable Persons Suspected or Accused in Criminal Proceedings, frames disability in terms of “vulnerability.” In contrast, parts of the EU Victims’ Rights Directive address the situation of individuals with disabilities without using the language of vulnerability.