Democracy, universal suffrage and disability

Abstract

States Party undertake to guarantee the right to vote and to be voted for persons with disability from the ratification of the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (article 29). The Spanish Electoral Law was amended in December of 2018 to adapt Spanish Law to the Convention. This reform abolished legal restrictions on political participation of persons with disabilities and gave back political rights to those who have been deprived of them as a consequence of judicial decisions. Since then, several voices recall the reasons behind deprivation of the rights to active and passive suffrage for persons with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities and cognitive impairment. The present work aims to justify that arguments for exclusion of this persons from political processes still present in the Spanish context are based on the same stereotypes that the Convention tries to remov