Social Structures
Author: Matthew McKenna, PhD Researcher at Maynooth University’s Assisted Living and Learning Institute (ALL Institute)
On March 24th, we celebrate the United Nations International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims. This day honours the memory of victims of gross and systematic human rights violations and promotes the right to truth and justice. In this context, it reminds us of historical and contemporary violations of the rights of persons with disabilities who, in many regions, still experience institutionalization, forced treatments and conditions amounting to torture. This piece briefly discusses the post-modern chronology of suffering endured by persons with disabilities in the struggle for equal treatment and recognition. It emphasises the importance of remembering victims of the past by advancing the struggle for full-spectrum equality for persons with disabilities in the modern world.
The conception and defence of disability rights in Europe represents a difficult and tumultuous journey over the past eighty years. The darkest episodes of human rights violations against persons with disabilities are still within living memory for many older persons across the continent. Modern European history has witnessed forced sterilisation of persons with disabilities and later their mass-murder in the form of ‘mercy-killings’ during National Socialism in the period encompassing 1933-1945, (BBC 2008). (Watson & Vehmas ed., 2020) state that the, ‘1950 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) chiefly enshrines civil and political rights’; they posit that the ECHR contained the seeds of a disability human rights convention, ‘Several characteristics of the post-war human rights settlement were promising from a disability perspective’. Since the turn of the millennium, the EU has taken a far more active role in protecting the rights of persons with disabilities and is attempting to standardise, harmonise and mainstream their protection in every EU member state through the European Disability Strategy 2010-2020 and the Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021-2030. However, since the absorption of many former-Soviet states into the EU after 2004, a great divide exists in standards of disability rights protection between members of the EU.
Whilst one may reasonably contend that disability rights protection in the EU is now a world away from what existed in the 1940s, persons with disabilities are still widely discriminated against in everyday life as institutionalization remains the normative societal response to disability. In the modern political climate, it is arguable that the post-war values that underpin the development of human rights, are still fragile within EU and non-EU countries on the European continent. These values have met with some success in slowly replacing the wardship-mindset which has lingered continuously throughout parts of Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, Lewis (2002) notes the following of certain European countries:
‘In some countries, prosecutors still retain the Stalin-esque power to order detention in a psychiatric institution without prior medical opinion’.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, as a result of the work of disability advocacy networks, the ‘social model’ of disability care trickled into the political domain as the favoured modality of future normative approaches to disability in Europe. The social model, a revolutionary concept in the field of disability rights advocacy, supports the empowerment of persons with disabilities through de-institutionalisation and advocates total equality, autonomy and accessibility for all persons with disabilities. It champions the socio-legal, technological, physical and conceptual restructuring of society and public infrastructure to effect and enable such empowerment.
Though the memories of a dark European past may seem distant to younger generations, there are people alive today who endured the horrors of war, genocide and authoritarian regimes, whose regard for human rights, and the dignity of the individual, was entirely absent. More recent memories of life under Communism linger on in many parts of Europe. There are survivors amongst us today, though dwindling in number, who lived through a time when in central Europe “news-reels and cinema films portrayed disabled people as ‘useless eaters’ and people who had ‘lives unworthy of living’”, (BBC 2008). The scars of this time can still be easily found across the cities of Europe and beyond, and in the memories of survivors, and in the memorials and deafening silence left in the wake of the millions who did not survive.
In a world where authoritarianism and anti-democratic forces are on the rise again, it is extremely important that we remember why the values of human rights and dignity underpin the effort to ensure equal rights for persons with disabilities. This past represents a shameful tragedy in the collective human memory, it educates future generations on what can happen to vulnerable persons with disabilities, amongst others, when values of human rights are trodden under the boots of authoritarianism. Therefore, it cannot be taken for granted that the rights of persons with disabilities will be advanced and defended if civil-society and disability advocacy networks do not continue their invaluable work to defend the rights of persons with disabilities. The United Nations ‘International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims’, reminds us that the struggle for universal equality is a multi-generational effort that must honour the victims of the past by advancing inclusion, equality and universal rights for persons with disabilities in the contemporary world.