Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)

The CRPD is an international law about the human rights of people with disability. It doesn’t create new rights, but it does go into detail about the areas in which our human rights are often ignored, and says what governments should do about it. Find out more at our human rights issue page.

A UN Committee is a group of independent experts that keeps an eye on a particular international law and how different countries are implementing it. The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is responsible for the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Find out more from the UN.

Note: The acronym CRPD can be used for either the Convention or the Committee. To try to avoid confusion, we use CRPD to talk about the Convention, and then say CRPD Committee when we’re talking about the Committee.

There is also an Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (OPCRPD). When Australia signed this optional protocol, we agreed that the CRPD Committee can investigate complaints that people or groups from Australia make about violations of the human rights of people with disability.