Much of the literature that seeks to describe the experiences of disabled people using the language of human rights has been written by non-lawyers. This literature has proved to be of enormous importance, since it has enabled the development of discourses which explore the whole spectrum of disabled people's experiences, untrammelled by the constraints of the legalistic approach. Human rights cannot ultimately be defined by or confined to International Conventions and Covenants. While these documents are within the province of the law, they usually reflect and condense prevalent philosophies of rights developed, for the most part, by non-lawyers.

The dearth of legal texts in this field however, has been the subject of comment. Hendriks (1999, p 113) for example, refers to the silence of human rights scholars, and Gostin and Mann (1999, p 54) comment upon a similar absence in the field of health and human rights. It is hoped that in considering the implications of the Human Rights Act for disabled people, this book will, in addition to analysing the reasons for this relative silence, make a small contribution towards redressing the balance.

On one level, the lack of legal comment on disabled people's human rights has a relatively straightforward explanation. Until recently, with the exception of the field of mental health detention, there have been remarkably few human rights cases litigated in international and domestic tribunals that are of direct relevance to disabled people. Case law is the raw material for most legal commentaries and without it there is only a limited amount that can be said. Such an explanation however, begs the inevitable question as to why there have been so few cases. We suggest the answer does not lie in the fact that Human Rights Conventions are not directly relevant to the experiences of disabled people, but in the problem of access. Simply, that disabled people have been severely handicapped by the legal process in accessing these rights. In many respects, the problem is not so much with the rights as with the lack of access to effective remedies. Without significant procedural reform, it is likely that, for most disabled people, these rights will remain illusory and hypothetical. We regard this to be one of the central themes of the book.