World Federation of the Deaf

 Deaf people consider themselves as a linguistic and cultural group, with highly complex natural languages but the rights of deaf people are however assured through disability policy, legislation and international instruments.  Deaf identity is not a monolithic entity and a person can also have other identities relating to gender, race, disability, socioeconomic status.  On the international level, the United Nations has assured human rights by: the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD); the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) concerning the rights of persons belonging to ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities (specifically Article 27); the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (specifically Article 30); and the Declaration on the Rights of Persons belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (the Minorities Declaration).  Deaf Communities are minority communities which have been defined as: “a group which is smaller in number than the rest of the population of a State, whose members have ethnic, religious or linguistic features different from those of the rest of the population, and are guided, if only implicitly, by the will to safeguard their culture, traditions, religion or language.  Deaf people have a linguistic human right to use sign language as a mother tongue in the family, in the school and the wider community but disability legislation (particularly the CRPD) is not the only legislative means available to achieve this right.  Disability is defined according to a human rights model of disability. Under the social model of disability that precedes the human rights model, it is the interaction between an individual’s ‘impairment’ and barriers in society that creates “disability”. In other words, it is the environment that is disabling, not the ‘impairment’ itself.  Linguistic rights are important for deaf people and should not only be granted within a disability paradigm. Deaf Communities sometimes need linguistic rights as linguistic rights and not as a part of a disability construct.