Voices of Individuals: Collectively Exploring Self-Determination

The Voices of Individuals: Collectively Exploring Self-determination (VOICES) project aimed to change the law in relation to the right to legal capacity for people with disabilities. The project was based at the Centre for Disability Law and Policy, NUI Galway under Prof. Eilionóir Flynn.

The project finished on the 30th of November 2018.

The right to legal capacity in its most basic form is the right to make decisions which have legal consequences and to have those decisions respected by the law. This project took an innovative approach to legal capacity law reform by publishing the stories of those with lived experience of disability and pairing them with researchers, practitioners, front line workers in disability services and activists to develop grounded ideas for legal reform. The project was structured across four thematic areas – criminal responsibility, contractual capacity, consent to medical treatment and consent to sex and relationships.

The VOICES project placed participants from eleven countries and five different continents in pairs. Each of the pairs worked together to co-author a chapter of an edited collection entitled, ‘Global Perspectives on Legal Capacity Reform: Our Voices, Our Stories,’ which was published by Routledge in 2018.

For more information regarding this project, click here.

Our Aim

The Voices of Individuals: Collectively Exploring Self-determination (VOICES) project aims to change the law in relation to the right to legal capacity for people with disabilities. This project will take a radical approach to legal capacity law reform by using the stories of those with lived experience of disability and pairing them with legal or social sciences scholars to develop grounded recommendations for reform.

Outputs

Degener T. Editor’s foreword. International Journal of Law in Context. 2017;13(1):1-5.

Loomes, G. (2019). Global perspectives on legal capacity reform: our voices, our stories: edited by Eilionóir Flynn, Anna Arstein-Kerslake, Clióna de Bhailís, and Maria Laura Serra, Abingdon, Routledge, 2019, 218 pp., £96.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-13-829891-0. Disability & Society, 35(7), 1195–1196.

de Bhailís C, Flynn E. Recognising legal capacity: commentary and analysis of Article 12 CRPD. International Journal of Law in Context. 2017;13(1):6-21.

Arstein-Kerslake A, Flynn E. The right to legal agency: domination, disability and the protections of Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. International Journal of Law in Context. 2017;13(1):22-38.

Flynn E, Arstein-Kerslake A. State intervention in the lives of people with disabilities: the case for a disability-neutral framework. International Journal of Law in Context. 2017;13(1):39-57.

Brosnan L, Flynn E. Freedom to negotiate: a proposal extricating ‘capacity’ from ‘consent.’ International Journal of Law in Context. 2017;13(1):58-76.

Minkowitz T. CRPD and transformative equality. International Journal of Law in Context. 2017;13(1):77-86. doi:10.1017/S1744552316000483

Dhanda A. Conversations between the proponents of the new paradigm of legal capacity. International Journal of Law in Context. 2017;13(1):87-95.

Nobles R, Schiff D. Taking the evolution of legal doctrine seriously: review of Katayoun Baghai, Social Systems Theory and Judicial Review: Taking Jurisprudence Seriously (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. 188). International Journal of Law in Context. 2017;13(1):96-120.

IJC volume 13 issue 1 Cover and Front matter. International Journal of Law in Context. 2017;13(1):f1-f3. doi:10.1017/S1744552317000015

IJC volume 13 issue 1 Cover and Back matter. International Journal of Law in Context. 2017;13(1):b1-b4. doi:10.1017/S1744552317000027

Impacts

As part of the final project workshop and book launch, an exhibition of objects which were central to the participants’ stories was held at the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission in Dublin, and subsequently at the Institute of Lifecourse and Society. All the storytellers in the project met in a closed session with a decision-maker who we collaboratively identified as someone with power to create change related to the issues raised in the co-authored chapter. This included judges, journalists, lawyers, law enforcement officials, senior members of an aviation authority, directors of guardianship and supported decision-making offices, human rights commissioners, a senior official in a banking and payments federation, and ombudsman offices. These exchanges have led to concrete change and ongoing collaboration between the project participants and these decision-makers.