Saying All the Right Things and Still Getting it Wrong

This article explores and reviews the approach of the Court of Justice of the EU to defining disability under the Employment Equality Directive and concentrates, in particular, on the two most recent cases which were decided in 2014: Z and Kaltoft and the relevance of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), to which the EU is a party. The article argues that the Court's approach to defining disability, as applied in practice, is not compatible with either the wording or spirit of the CRPD, and there is a real danger that the CJEU's mistaken approach will also trickle down to national courts. This is in spite of the fact that the Court pays lip service to the social contextual model of disability as outlined in the CRPD in its judgments.