The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as a new paradigm for the implementation of social policies

Abstract

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, approved by the UN in 2006 and incorporated into Brazilian law as a constitutional amendment in 2009, is analyzed as a new paradigm to reorient the forms of implementation of social policies in the country. Through a qualitative and critical analysis based on disability studies, it is argued that the principle, above all, of autonomy with supports, participation of people with disabilities in the elaboration of law and the politics and the elimination of disabling barriers are in the background of the Convention in a substantially innovative way when comparing to the constitutional guarantees affirmed in 1988 around the notion of human dignity and citizenship rights. This is the Convention's main contribution to inaugurate a new paradigm for social policies in the Brazilian scencario, understanding them in their contradictory and historical aspects of collective responses to demands for meeting human needs, with the potential to overcome even people with disabilities by reach the entire population, either by the universalizing expectation of the Convention, or by the guarantees based on the perspective of the integrality of human rights.