United Kingdom

This chapter explores how courts in the United Kingdom have used and interpreted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) by analysing the seventy-five cases mentioning the CRPD prior to June 2016. These cases are unevenly spread—in geography and in subject matter. In a significant number of these cases, civil society organisations and equality bodies supported disabled litigants (eg through third party interventions). The Public Sector Equality Duty has been construed as giving judges very little power to use the CRPD to hold public sector bodies to account. The CRPD was used as an interpretive aid only in connection with understanding how ECHR and EU law should be understood in the domestic context—suggesting that, were ECHR and EU law no longer to be part of United Kingdom law, the CRPD would play a greatly diminished role in guiding case law in the United Kingdom.