Contenu du sommaire : Droit et handicap

Based on research in Belgian and French diplomatic archives, official UN documents, and ILO archives, this article aims to explain the genesis of the Declaration of the Rights of Disabled Persons, adopted by the UN in 1975 in the middle of the Cold War. We reconstruct the interactions between the actors involved in its conception and show how the Belgian delegation at the UN showed great diplomatic skill in getting the Declaration adopted in a single session of the General Assembly. They managed to avoid potential obstruction from socialist countries and convinced other delegations of the legitimacy of an exceptional procedure, which had the effect of excluding NGOs from the discussion process. The Declaration reinforces the dynamics of normalization and legitimizes a series of rights, notably political rights, but restricts and obscures other rights (accessibility, etc.).

Fifteen years after its adoption by the General Assembly of the United Nations and ten years after its ratification, France's adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is judged harshly by UN bodies. This severity is based not so much on the question of the application of an international standard as on that of the “human rights model of disability.” Through the notion of domestication to analyze the influence of CRPD article 12 in the French context, this article seeks to shed light on the social and institutional conditions of changes in representing the rights of people with disabilities. It will show the scope and the limits of the domestication of article 12 based on the example of the universalization of the right to vote for all disabled people and the reluctance to transform legal norms such as those of guardianship and treatment without consent.

The adoption of article 64 of the ELAN law, in 2018, marks the end of the implementation of the principle of “accessibility for all to everything” established by the law of February 11, 2005. The deletion of this right from the texts is surprising, as this provision was hardly implemented. This article seeks to understand how a right dies. The right to accessibility was a moral and legal obligation that tolerated numerous derogations. Its abolition might have seemed unnecessary and costly. An analysis of the adoption of the Elan law highlights the specific conditions in which a right can disappear. Far from leading to only limited effectiveness, the successive derogations and simplifications have had an effect on written law by forging new categories of public action. We also show that the disappearance of the right to accessibility is linked to its competition with another right, the right of use.

Since the beginning of the 2010s, the medico-social establishment has been the subject of strong criticism. This context invites us to question the concrete scope of the gains made by disabled people and their organizations in terms of rights to care. Our article aims to understand how the work of implementing rights interacts with the agenda of local public institutions, which is largely determined by the imperative to reduce expenditures. To this end, it mobilizes a localized investigation of the struggles and appropriations around a new right, instituted at the end of a parental judicial offensive and supposed to guarantee an effective and individualized “response” to each request for support. The survey shows that, subject to the strategic investments by their project managers, these “responses” addressed to people in the disability field are less effective rights than an instrument of managerial rationalization that circumvents the demands for additional resources.

In France, an employment quota sets the minimum proportion of people with documented disabilities at 6% of the workforce in companies and public agencies. Its implementation requires categorization as “disabled worker,” whose main modality is an administrative status, the “reconnaissance de la qualité de travailleur handicapé” (recognition as being a disabled worker, RQTH). Based on 67 biographical interviews with people living with mobility or visual impairments or specific learning disorders, we analyze the ambivalent reception of this status by of this status by eligible persons. The RQTH has multiple implications: identity ascription to a possibly stigmatizing category, prerequisite for reasonable accommodation, and hypothetical lever for positive discrimination. People's trade-offs depend on the visibility of their impairment and the socialization they have received. Requests for RQTH and mentions of the status during job applications are common and sometimes forced among people with mobility or visual impairments, while they are more atypical among people with specific learning disorders.

The asbestos scandal gave rise to two innovations: the Fonds d'indemnisation des Victimes de l'Amiante (Fiva-Asbestos Victims Compensation Fund), which is more favorable to victims than the traditional compensation system for occupational diseases, and the faute inexcusable de l'employeur (inexcusable employer fault) lawsuits, which allow compensation to be paid by employers found guilty. The Fiva has been criticized by some sociologists, who see it as a continuation of the monetarization of occupational risks without any moral dimension, since it is not based on the punishment of guilty employers. On the contrary, the article shows the diversity of normative expectations built around these procedures and the role of “legal intermediaries” in stabilizing these expectations.

Within science fiction, the cyberpunk subgenre has been important in the speculative depiction of “artificial intelligences” and their effects. Between fascination and anxiety, these literary stories also offer a laboratory carrying out a work of problematization and already revealing a set of issues of regulation and control. Starting from the main works of this current, in particular those of the first American authors of the 1980s, the article proposes to apprehend these representations and what these stagings reveal as difficulties or even risks for humans in their relations with these entities. It then turns more specifically to the attempts outlined to regain forms of control and, above all, to the almost inevitable limits that they make it possible to identify and think about.

Based on three ethnographic studies carried out in the regions of Calais, Briançon, and Menton-Ventimiglia, the article analyzes the difficulties, opportunities, and ambivalences faced by actors involved in solidarity with illegalized foreigners at French borders, while using the law as a repertoire of contention. By doing so, it aims to contribute to two distinct fields of academic thought: one focusing on the relationship between the law and social movements and the other grasping the role of non-state and associative actors in the implementation of immigration control policies. By revitalizing the classical debate on the potential and limits of the law as a weapon for social movements, and as an instrument of social and political change, the article exposes the specificities as well as the ambiguities of activists' uses of the law in solidarity with migrants at borders.

Despite the work of a few specialists, Ehrlich's sociology of law has long remained poorly known, at least in Europe, whereas it has been very successful in the United States and Japan. Moreover, it has often been analyzed through the prism of the controversy between Ehrlich and Kelsen, without always appreciating the extent of the reversal that Kelsen himself subsequently made. Initially published in 1992, this text aims to situate Ehrlich's sociology in its context, show its importance for the constitution of empirical sociology of law, and draw up a critical assessment.