List of definitions

• The Convention: The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
• The Optional Protocol to the Convention: The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which allows individuals and institutions in countries that have voluntarily ratified the Protocol to submit complaints directly to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in accordance with rules and conditions, chief of which are that the complainant's country must have ratified the Optional Protocol and the complainant must have exhausted domestic remedies without success.
• The Committee: The United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which is mandated to monitor the implementation of the Convention, review and discuss the reports of States parties and the reports of civil society organizations, and examine complaints based on the Optional Protocol to the Convention.
• ESCWA: United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.
• Legal capacity: The law's recognition of a person's enjoyment of all rights and freedoms stipulated in human rights charters, constitutions and legislation, and of his or her right to make decisions, take actions and enter into legal contracts on all matters concerning them as individuals.
• Accessibility: Physical and design modifications to buildings, facilities, roads, transportation, media and services in order to enable persons with disabilities to independently and privately access them on an equal basis with others.
• Accessible formats: Information, data and other materials that are presented in ways that allow persons with disabilities to independently and privately access and understand their contents, such as Braille, large print, electronic formats, audio formats, sign language and Easy Read for people with intellectual disabilities.
• Reasonable accommodations: Equipment and/or procedural or physical modifications to environments, timescales, tools or surrounding conditions to enable a person with a disability to exercise a right, freedom or day-to-day activity that take into account the burden such arrangements may place on the entity responsible for providing them and the desired benefits thereof without these considerations resulting in a failure to provide them.
• Welfare approach to disability: Individual and institutional patterns of behaviour that view persons with disabilities as embodying a state of vulnerability that warrants constant care, permanent guardianship and pity, while failing to recognize them as autonomous and independent persons with the right to make decisions and the freedom to make their own choices.
• Attitudinal barriers: Negative stereotypes, prejudice, personal opinions, and individual and institutional practices that prevent disability from being accepted as a part of natural human diversity and hinder the inclusion of persons with disabilities in one or more aspects of life.
• Social model of disability: An approach that views disability as a dynamic state that arises and persists as a result of the interplay between personal circumstances, in the form of disability in a physical, sensory, psychological, mental or neurological sense; physical barriers in the surrounding environment, due to that environment being not adapted or poorly adapted; and individual and/or institutional attitudinal barriers.
• Medical model of disability: An approach that views disability as an individual medical condition in isolation from any impact on or influence from the surrounding environment, whereby assessment of the condition and challenges, as well as the proposed solutions, are focused on the individual in isolation from his or her family and community environment.
• Human rights-based model: A model that looks at disability issues through the lens of human rights principles and charters and classifies disability-related rights as inherent civil, political, social, economic or cultural rights rather than new rights. The model therefore does not diminish the rights of persons with disabilities, nor does it reclassify and relegate any of these rights to the status of services due to them being exercised in a way that differs from the norm for persons without disabilities or for any other reason.