digitalcommons.nyls.edu Faculty Scholarship Articles & Chapters 2009 A Change is Gonna Come: The mplicI ations of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for the Domestic Practice of Constitutional Mental Disability Law Michael L. Perlin New York Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/fac_articles_chapters Part of the Disability Law Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, and the Law and Psychology Commons Recommended Citation Northern Illinois University Law Review, Vol. 29, Issue 3 (Summer 2009), pp. 483-498 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at DigitalCommons@NYLS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles & Chapters by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@NYLS. "A Change Is Gonna Come": The Implications of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for the Domestic Practice of Constitutional Mental Disability Law MICHAEL L. PERLIN* I. INTRO DUCTION ................................................................................. 483 II. U NIVERSAL FACTORS ....................................................................... 487 I1. THE UN CONVENTION ...................................................................... 489 IV . SOME FINAL THOUGHTS ................................................................... 497 I. INTRODUCTION As recently as fifteen years ago, disability was not broadly acknowl- edged as a human rights issue. Although there were prior cases decided in the United States and in Europe that, retrospectively, had been litigated from a human rights perspective,' the characterizationof "disability rights" (especially the rights of persons with mental disabilities) was not discussed in a global public, political, or legal debate until the early 1990s. Instead, disability was seen only as a medical problem of the individual requiring a treatment or cure.