Reaching one’s potential: A discussion of individual human rights and people with developmental disabilities

Editor's note: The ideas presented in this paper primarily represent a useful, and user-friendly, summary of information contained in a report entitled "Enhancing the rights and personal freedoms of people with disabilities, " published in 2000 by Accreditation Ontario and restated with permission. In recent years, understanding disability as part of the range of human characteristics for which society has an obligation to respond positively is replacing models that focus on individual deficits. Positive social response includes protection of human rights for people with disabilities. Yet, the history of services for people with developmental disabilities in Canada is fraught with human rights violations, and many continue in a variety of forms today. This paper summarizes basic rights protection for people with developmental disabilities in Canada, and points out numerous examples, both past and present, of how easy it is to violate those rights. In recent decades, there has been a growing concern about protecting and enhancing the rights of people with developmental disabilities. In particular, there has been a gradual shift away from the concept of disability as pathology, and a shift toward disability being understood from the perspective of social and human rights-based models (Bach, 2003; Rioux & Carbert, this issue). However, we have been slow to change, and "the discourse of human rights has not yet influenced thinking in the area of developmental disability as much as it has in other areas, such as gender, race and religion " (Bach, 2003, p. 38). The discussion in this paper is an exploration of rights as they pertain to people with developmental disabilities in Canada in support of the trend toward a rights-based understanding of disability