Promoting Health of Persons With Intellectual Disabilities Using the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities: Early Implementation Assessment in Spain and Hungary

The article explores the initial achievements in the process of implementation of the Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) with a special focus on health of persons with intellectual disabilities (ID) in Spain and Hungary, the first countries to submit and receive a review for their report in the European Union. The CRPD is a major human rights instrument of the United Nations that was adopted in 2006 with the goal of ensuring protection of rights of persons with disabilities by holding governments accountable for the services they provide to this population. It was found that the reports designed to represent official state comments on the situation of human rights of persons with disabilities often do not follow the reporting requirements of the Convention in terms of required data. Moreover, they do not use a unified understanding of disability promoted by the Convention and make no mention of many important health-related issues. Access to health is generally understood in a purely physical sense of availability and accessibility of services, while no attention is given to specific expectations and needs of persons with disabilities or to the competence of health staff to work with vulnerable groups. In order to be able to implement the Convention, governments need to carefully assess their country's status quo with regard to disability policies and politics, and at the same time need to develop action plans to implement the CRPD.