Does your carer take sugar? Carers and human rights: the parallel struggles of disabled people and carers for equal treatment

Clements, Luke 2013. Does your carer take sugar? Carers and human rights: the parallel struggles of disabled people and carers for equal treatment. Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice (JCRSJ) 19 (2) , pp. 397-434.

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Abstract

This paper considers the struggle being waged by unpaid carers (sometimes referred to as ‘carergivers’) for recognition as ‘rights holders’. It locates the origins and describes the growth of the ‘carers movement’ and argues that it has many similarities with the Disabled People’s movement that came to prominence in the 1970’s. The paper: (1) identifies the distinct legal status that carers have in the majority of states in the world; (2) describes carers’ shared history of adverse treatment within most states; and (3) argues that carers’ social exclusion arises from a widespread hostility to ‘dependency’ – a hostility that is gendered and particularly evident in neoliberal political discourse. The paper argues that there is a substantive human right ‘to care’ – one that fits most comfortably within the civil and political right to ‘privacy / private life’; that states have positive human rights obligations to carers; and that ‘being a carer’ should (and will) become a protected status for the purposes of non-discrimination legislation, on the same basis as other protected statuses (such as disability). The paper concludes with a caveat: that the recognition of caring as a human right and of carers as ‘right holders’ (although inevitable and of great importance) will not in itself be sufficient – that this much we also learn from the Disabled People’s movement.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Law
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General) K Law > KZ Law of Nations
Publisher:	Washington and Lee University School of Law
ISSN:	1942-5732
Related URLs:	Publisher
Last Modified:	13 Oct 2016 03:04
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/48097

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