International Law
Dignity, discrimination and accommodation in education. By Thiandi Groof, International and Human Rights Master of Laws (LL.M)
"I am 31 years old. I just finished my advanced Masters in International and European Human Rights law in Leiden University. In this curriculum they didn’t pay attention to the Convention on Rights for People with Disabilities (CRPD), but general discrimination law was very interesting and helpful for my thesis. I live in my own apartment in Amsterdam with 24/7 personal assistance. Communication for me is difficult, because I need a facilitator for it and facilitators are difficult to find.
I hope to be able to contribute more to ALLFIE and for the inclusive education movement in the Netherlands. Alas, the Dutch movement is small, and I miss a group like Quiet Riot here. Without inclusive education, emancipation will never emerge. In order to finish the masters programme of European and International human rights law, I wrote the thesis ‘Dutch legal protection of the right to education for children with disabilities’. My conclusion was that there is no legal protection of this right for children with disabilities. This thesis challenged me to think about the relation between dignity, discrimination and accommodation in education. The pain that I always had felt, when again and again I was excluded from mainstream schools, I now saw described by scholars like Degener (Degener, T. Disability in a human rights context 19. Laws 2016, 5, 35); and in court cases like Brown versus the Board of education (347 U.S. 483 §494 (1954)). In this last case the US Court concluded that ‘separate is not equal’, because of the violation of dignity when a person is excluded on whatever ground. This made my hurt feelings touchable and hopefully these written words make it easier to convince people that exclusion is a violence for the dignity of all people who are excluded, even when the medical model declares that segregation in special institutes will deliver them better services. The human rights model requests that these services must be delivered in mainstream settings.
What is dignity?
Dignity is the right to be valued, respected and welcomed in the community. Every form of discrimination is an infliction of this dignity and a devaluation of the person because the discriminating institute, people or community, judges you not to be valuable enough to be a member of their community. The right to dignity, without discrimination, is the central principle in the human rights treaties. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the CRPD, signed and ratified by the UK, elaborates on this principle of dignity and other principles in Article 3, which are:
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