Why talk about ‘fragile’ rights? In the field of disability, the idea of fragility is more commonly associated with people themselves than with their rights. In contrast to the classic image of fragile disabled people as passive objects of protection, the experiences described in this book show active subjects, endowed with reflexivity, critical capacity, and a potential for innovation.

Their rights, on the other hand, deserve to be described as ‘fragile’: often imprecise from the moment they are legally enshrined, they suffer from major shortcomings in terms of effectiveness in all the studied areas (education, employment, social policy, accessibility). Faced with these imperfectly realized rights, many individuals protest (at least in the interview situation) and take action, negotiate, tinker, adapt, to make their rights more concrete, and in the same movement, to assert themselves as subjects of rights. This everyday politics takes place at a distance from the collectives involved in the politicization of disability, whether they be associations or, a fortiori, public officials, towards whom several people make a demand for descriptive representation.

Fragile rights

While disability rights are often reduced to anti-discriminatory civil rights (Heyer 2005), we insisted on the need to understand them in a broader way, including social rights. Taken as a whole, disability rights in France present vulnerabilities as of their legal inscription, and even more so in their implementation.

The limits of rights in the texts

There are several limitations to the enactment of these rights. Despite the rise of a rhetoric of individual rights, the explicit reference to rights struggles to make it past the explanatory memorandum and into the legal texts themselves. The Law of 11 February 2005 is a good illustration of this. Rights are more likely to be included in the law in the form of a reference to collective obligations (for example in the fields of education or accessibility) than in the form of an explicit statement of individual rights (right to schooling in a mainstream environment, right to accessibility). Although individual rights and collective obligations can be considered as two sides of the same coin, we note here the limits of the acclimatation of the rights register in the field of disability in France.