The European disability rights revolution

Abstract

Until recently, an EU citizen’s legal standing to challenge disability discrimination was nonexistent or sharply curtailed in most jurisdictions. The situation changed drastically with the adoption of Directive 2000/78, also known as the Employment Equality Directive. Most academic commentary has been highly critical of the judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ), taking it to task for failing to embrace the “social model of disability”.In this article, I seek to demonstrate the value of analysing ECJ case law from a perspectiveother than the dominant paradigm, and to show how a different methodological approach can provide new insights into our understanding of the trajectory of the ECJ’s jurisprudence.Instead of using the social model of disability to benchmark how the ECJ’s case law has developed, I compare Directive 2000/78 and ECJ judgments to those of the Americans with the Disabilities Act and decisions of US courts.