Around 18th–15th Century BC Moses writes The Five Books, the first part of the Hebrew Bible. He proclaims the Ten Commandments -a code of conduct toward others.
1792–1750 B.C. Collapse of Shamshi-Adad’s kingdom after his death. Hammurabi incorporates all of southern Mesopotamia into the kingdom of Babylon.
More recently, in 2006, the UN adopted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This Convention follows decades of work by the United Nations to change attitudes and approaches to persons with disabilities. It represents a paradigm shift and it takes to a new height the movement from viewing persons with disabilities as ‘objects’ of charity, medical treatment and social protection towards viewing persons with disabilities as ‘subjects’ with rights, who are capable of claiming those rights and making decisions for their lives based on their free and informed consent as well as being active members of society.8 All this long history* is to illustrate how obtaining human rights represents a struggle of all persons to improve their lives. Women, children, persons with disabilities… The case of the CRPD is paramount to understand how the struggle of several individuals can contribute to change. NGOs that worked for the rights of persons with disabilities were the key drivers for change. In the year 2000, in an NGO summit held in Beijing, China, the first steps for the creation of a convention were taken. In 2001, a UN Working Group was created and in 2006 the convention was adopted. Persons with disabilities organized in * Which still left behind other important human rights conventions, such as the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, and the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
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A First Glance at the Matter
1500 BC–630 AD Today’s largest religions in the world were created and their sacred books were written. Many are precursors of human rights.
the form of Non-Governmental Organizations put pressure on their government and on the governments of the world present at the UN for the creation of the treaty. The CRPD is the fastest human rights treaty negotiated in history. These groups of persons did not see their lives change in the blink of an eye. In many cases, not much has changed —take a look at your city, can people with disabilities access all public buildings? It would not take anyone more than five minutes to find examples of violations of the rights of women, children and persons with disabilities in the media, in the streets and sometimes even at home. But the violations do not mean that there are no rights and the conventions give these persons —each one of them— a possibility to demand action from their states. For many, human rights might be only international guarantees full of meaning within the international sphere and in the rooms of international negotiators, without real implementation on the ground. It is undeniable that not all human beings have all the rights that the conventions guarantee. The equality of all human beings is constantly being challenged. Nonetheless, human rights represent a wish, an aspiration, and an idea to seek. Much has been achieved through human rights —formal prohibition of child labor, guarantee of free primary education for all and access to anti-retroviral drugs (drugs used in the treatment of HIV/AIDS) to the poor in developing countries. Nevertheless, there is still a long way to go. In the world in which we live