The URG Team and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung

Since its establishment eight decades ago, the United Nations has played a central role in raising awareness about and advancing the rights of persons with disabilities, who constitute approximately 15 per cent of the world’s population and overwhelmingly live in the Global South. In 2006, the combined efforts of the international community and the global disability rights movement culminated in the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), a landmark international treaty codifying the obligations of States to promote, protect and respect the rights of persons living with disabilities.

The central, transformative pledge of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to ‘leave no one behind’ cannot be achieved without the inclusion of the estimated one billion people around the world living today with a disability. Their heightened vulnerability to multidimensional poverty is compounded by many barriers they face in their daily lives, including a lack of accessibility in physical and virtual environments, stigma and discrimination, a lack of access to energy, assistive technologies, and rehabilitation, and a lack of measures designed to promote independent living. Unless these barriers are dismantled, persons with disabilities will remain disproportionately excluded from full participation in economic, social, cultural, civic, and political life, undermining the realisation of their rights, and the achievement of the SDGs.

The international human rights system, especially the three main compliance mechanisms (the Universal Periodic Review – UPR, Treaty Bodies, and Special Procedures) represents, in principle,a powerful motor of change, driving progress with the fulfilment of States’ international human rights obligations and commitments, including obligations under the CRPD, and thereby also accelerating progress towards the SDGs leaving no one behind.

To understand the degree to which the human rights system is fulfilling this role, and helping secure implementation and on the ground impact, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) and the Universal Rights Group (URG) have, over the past two years, conducted a global analysis to assess and understand the impact of the international human rights system on the enjoyment of the rights of persons with disabilities. The results of that analysis are presented in this report.

The first part of the report presents the results of KAS-URG’s analysis of State cooperation with the three main UN human rights mechanisms since 2007, and, importantly, of the resulting recommendations extended to States. In particular, the analysis sought to identify all those recommendations related to the rights of persons with disabilities, measure their prevalence (both in absolute terms and compared with other group rights), and understand their principal areas of focus.

On the basis of that analysis, this report reveals that between 2007 and 2025, the three main human rights mechanisms extended nearly 16,000 disability rights-related recommendations to member States – 54 per cent by the Treaty Bodies, 41 per cent by the UPR Working Group, and 5 per cent by Special Procedures mandate- holders. In a perhaps illustrative comparison, over broadly the same period (2007 to 2024), the same three mechanisms extended over 44,000 recommendations on gender equality, and women and girls’ rights. KAS-URG then undertook a detailed scrutiny of those roughly 16,000 recommendations to reveal the main thematic clusters.

Finally, KAS and URG selected six of the major themes and sub-themes identified in the recommendation analysis and tracked those clusters of recommendations down to the national level in six UN Member States, assessing levels of implementation of relevant recommendations, the impact of implementation measures (e.g., new or amended laws, policies, and practices) on the enjoyment of the rights of persons with disabilities, and the degree to which governments, civil society, UN Country Teams and other national stakeholders are succeeding in feeding data on implementation and impact, as well as new policy ideas, back into the UN mechanisms.