After a sixteen-year wait, Lebanon’s official alignment with the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) was ratified by the House of Representatives and promulgated by Law No. 291, dated April 12, 2022, and concluded by Cabinet Decision No. 42, dated February 6, 2023.

Here we are in the first year after the conclusion of this convention, and Lebanon has entered the group of countries that are supposed to bring their domestic legislation up to the level of the convention. In other words, the Lebanese legislature is supposed to replace Law 220/2000 on the rights of persons with disabilities with a law that harmonizes with the provisions of the international convention and the rights stipulated therein. Disabled people, as individuals and civil rights organizations, are waiting for the Lebanese legislature to shift its mindset from looking at the category of disabled people through the medical model and the charitable and pastoral model, two models that place the issue in the disabled person himself and his need to provide some medical services on the one hand or to care for him in isolated institutions on the other hand. The model that the Convention presents and adopts, and once it is ratified and concluded, the Lebanese state will also adopt it, is the social model, which sees the issue not in the disabled person, but in the society that prevents him from accessing places and information, does not invest in his abilities and does not respect his needs.

In fact, the Lebanese legislator does not have to create new texts. The texts of the international convention are clear, and all he has to do is to structure them so that they make their way to the concerned ministries, which must issue implementing decrees and allocate the necessary budgets for implementation.

We must recall that even the simplest decisions in Lebanon take time to be implemented, with officials citing the complex security and economic situation, and we must not forget that this same agreement waited on the doorstep of the Lebanese parliament from 2007 when the government approved it until 2022.

However, the issue does not only lie in the text of the convention. Parliament has ratified and the government has also concluded the Optional Protocol to the convention, a side agreement whereby the state recognizes the competence of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to consider complaints from individuals. Its legal text is largely based on the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which Lebanon has paid little attention to in implementation and to which it has significant reservations. The Optional Protocol entered into force with the Convention on May 3, 2008. As of September 2012, 92 countries have signed the protocol and 78 have ratified it. The Committee is a body of human rights experts (18 experts), tasked with monitoring the implementation of the Convention.