Significant Gaps Exist Between U.S. Disability Laws and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, New Federal Study Points Out

June 6, 2008

The National Council on Disability (NCD) has published a report to better understand how the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), if ratified by the United States, might affect U.S. disability laws. The report examines the degree to which U.S. law is consistent with the CRPD, and concludes that for the majority of Articles, U.S. law can be viewed as either being of a level with the mandates of the Convention, or capable of reaching those levels either through more rigorous implementation and/or additional actions by the U.S. Congress. However, the study identifies several CRPD Articles that illustrate significant gaps between United States disability laws and the Convention.

To read Finding the Gaps: A Comparative Analysis of Disability Laws in the United States to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), visit http://www.ncd.gov/whatsnew.htm.