Monitoring the Compliance of National Legal Frameworks in Arab Countries with the CRPD

This report is an exploratory study into the development of indicators for assessing the compliance of national legal frameworks in Arab countries with the CRPD requirements. It falls under larger ongoing efforts to support national and regional monitoring the progress of countries’ implementation of the CRPD in their legislative frameworks. This study proposes a set of compliance indicators to measure the compliance of laws to the CRPD and applies these indicators to the legal frameworks of four selected Arab countries. These indicators aim to measure the extent to which countries’ legal frameworks have been adjusted according to the word and spirit of the Convention, but do not examine how or whether these legal texts are implemented. Instead, the indicators are intended to reveal States’ commitment and intent to respect, protect and fulfill the rights of persons with disabilities as recognized in the Convention. Given that many countries adopted disability-related legal texts prior to the ratification of the Convention, indicators aim to allow for the identification of legal gaps that are not in compliance with the CRPD.

The report develops a limited set of indicators in three policy areas that aim to measure the progress of national legal frameworks in Arab countries in complying with the standards required by the CRPD. The report applies these indicators to the legal frameworks of four selected Arab countries in three specific policy areas. These are: education, work and employment and accessibility. These sectors were selected given that they are some of the most fundamental sectors to ensure the full participation in society of persons with disabilities on equal basis with others. Four countries were selected to analyze the implementation of the compliance indicators. These are: Lebanon, the Sudan, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates.

The study starts by providing a general overview of the legal frameworks related to disability in the selected countries. The report then develops a set of qualitative indicators that aim at measuring the compliance of national legal frameworks with the CRPD in the areas of education, employment and accessibility. It then continues to apply these indicators to the legal framework of the selected countries.