Inequality in life and death - Global study

Gerard Quinn, the former UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, confronts one of the most consequential gaps in international human rights law.

Bringing together the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the procedural dimension of the right to life, the Minnesota and Istanbul Protocols, international and regional jurisprudence, coronial systems and public enquiries, Quinn sets out the foundations of a new accountability agenda for unexplained deaths of persons with disabilities.

Investigating a death must mean more than identifying its immediate medical cause. States must also ask whether the death was foreseeable or preventable, what social and institutional conditions contributed to it, and whether similar failures continue to place other persons with disabilities at risk. This means exposing and understanding systemic injustice rather than simply closing individual cases.

Written for organisations of persons with disabilities, governments, treaty bodies, national human rights institutions, coroners, courts, investigators and researchers, this study opens an important new field of disability rights advocacy. It provides the legal arguments and practical tools needed to demand answers, secure remedies and drive reforms that can prevent future deaths.

Ultimately, this is not only a study about how persons with disabilities die. It is about whose lives are valued, which deaths command public attention, and how learning from death can help protect the living.

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