News and Developments
July 29, 2026: DRDI Issues Policy Paper on Disability Rights, Autonomous Weapons, and Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain
In June, DRDI issued a Policy Paper on Disability Rights, Autonomous Weapons, and Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain exploring disability issues arising from the rapid and widespread automation of conventional and nuclear weapons and broader systems of military surveillance, targeting, command, control and communications. The Paper, authored by Sean Howard and Tammy Bernasky, seeks to focus attention on both the negative impacts of automated militarism and warfare on persons with disabilities – building on the insight and analysis of both disarmament and disability rights experts – and the positive contributions that persons with disabilities can and are entitled to make to debates and negotiations on one of the most momentous topics of our time. In particular, the Paper seeks to intervene in two diplomatic processes underway at the United Nations: ‘Informal Exchanges on Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain’, most recently held in mid-June, and consideration – under the auspices of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) – of a possible new agreement on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS), due to resume in late August.
July 22, 2026: Towards Disability-Inclusive Nuclear Justice: DRDI Heralds New Report by Qazaq Nuclear Frontline Coalition
On July 2, the Qazaq Nuclear Frontline Coalition (QNFC) launched a major new report, From Harm to Justice: A Needs-Based Assessment of Nuclear-Affected Communities in Kazakhstan and Policy Pathways for Implementing Articles 6 and 7 of the TPNW [Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons]. Articles 6 and 7 of the TPNW – on Victim Assistance, Environmental Remediation, and International Cooperation and Assistance – were drafted with crucial input from survivors of nuclear use and violence. The report’s focus is on the 400 nuclear detonations in Kazakhstan by the Soviet Union at the Semipalatinsk (now Semey) test site and other locations from 1949-89. Amounting to roughly one fifth of all the ‘tests’ so far conducted, these massive, reverberating detonations have affected at least 1,500,000 people, causing an estimated 130,000+ deaths from radiation-related illness.
As the report details, such harms and impacts are multidimensional and intergenerational, causing and compounding a wide range of disabilities on a vast scale. Correspondingly, they require a ‘needs-based assessment’ rooted in a rights-based approach to recovery and reparation. As the TPNW’s first Review Conference (30 November 30-4 December, 2026) approaches, the meaningful inclusion of affected individuals and communities will again prove crucial in ensuring that implementing Articles 6 and 7 establishes a vital link between ‘assistance’ and empowerment, treating survivors not primarily as victims of circumstance but agents of change, building a structured culture of “participatory governance” in the TPNW and related nuclear justice spaces.
The report’s authors – QNFC co-founders Aigerim Seitenova and Yerdaulet Rakhmatulla – are supporters of the Disability Rights and Disarmament Initiative, and endorsed our 2025 civil society statement ‘ ‘In Our Own Right’ – to the United Nations First Committee on Disarmament and International Security. The statement, cited in the report, stresses the role of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in developing a disability-inclusive disarmament architecture and culture. In a powerful section entitled ‘The CRPD and Disarmament: from Damage Assessment to a Rights-based Assistance,’ Seitenova and Rakhmatulla argue that the “implications of disability within disarmament contexts remain insufficiently examined both in policymaking and within academic and humanitarian research.” This point was reinforced at the virtual launch event by one of DRDI’s leaders, Dr. Matthew Breay Bolton of Pace University, who was interviewed for the report and was closely involved in the negotiation of Articles 6 and 7.
We fully endorse the report’s comprehensive set of interlocking policy recommendations, a number of which directly relate to disability rights and inclusion. For example, the Government of Kazakhstan is urged to “reform disability assessment and compensation mechanisms” by updating its 1992 Law on Social Protection of Citizens affected by the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site. TPNW States Parties are urged to “promote the collection of disaggregated age and gender-sensitive data on the long term impacts of ionizing radiation,” including on persons with disabilities. Academia and scientific researchers are urged to conduct “interdisciplinary and community-informed research” on the “humanitarian, psychological, gendered, cultural, and intergenerational consequences” of nuclear detonations, including on persons with disabilities. Civil society organizations and nuclear-affected communities are urged to “strengthen transnational solidarity and coalition-building among nuclear-affected communities globally,” including “disability rights groups”. And nuclear-armed states and their military allies are urged, in addition to work in good faith to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons, to “engage directly and meaningfully with nuclear-affected communities as rights holder, experts, and equal partners” – including, of course, with respect to the rights held, expertise acquired, and partnership offered by persons with disabilities.
Some of these points were raised by the co-founders of DRDI, Tammy Bernasky and Sean Howard, in a working paper to the Third Meeting of States Parties to the TPNW in March 2025 – ‘Alignment and Alliance: Disability Rights in the Implementation and Review of the TPNW’ – and in a presentation to the TPNW’s Scientific Advisory Group (SAG) in November 2025. In their presentation to the SAG, they raised the issue of ‘legitimate’ expertise and admissible testimony in assessing nuclear impacts, arguing that the voices and lived experiences of persons with disabilities be heard and heeded. They further recommended that the SAG solicit testimony from QNFC members: testimony which would also be highly relevant to the TPNW’s intersessional working group on Victim Assistance, Environmental Remediation, and International Cooperation.
The United States’ codename for the first nuclear test detonation series – in Bikini Atoll, the Marshall Islands, in July 1946 – was Operation Crossroads. In the QNFC report’s main title – From Harm to Justice – the word ‘Harm’ is boldly crossed out, to emphasize the unacceptability of any nuclear violence or unrepaired harm. For over eighty years, the development, use, test detonation, production, and deployment of these Earth-threatening weapons has ‘crossed out’ the lives, livelihoods, cultures, environments, voices, stories, and perspectives of communities unconsciously ‘sacrificed’ to the demands of nuclear colonialism. In large numbers, and profoundly unjust ways, persons with disabilities, have suffered the consequences of this attempted erasure. As the TPNW now arrives at a ‘crossroads’ of its own, persons with disabilities can help energize and synergize efforts to deliver justice for past nuclear wrongs – and finally ‘cross out’ the spectre of nuclear annihilation.
July 22, 2026: DRDI Endorses Call for Disability Inclusion in the UN Crimes Against Humanity Convention
Writing in Just Security on June 29, 2026, seven leading international human rights lawyers and disability rights advocates issued a powerful and urgent call for “adopting a progressive rights view” in the drafting and development of the United Nations Convention on Crimes Against Humanity. Four of the authors of the call Will States Address Disability Invisibility in the Crimes Against Humanity Convention? – Kate McInnes, Janet Lord, Michael Stein, and Gerard Quinn (former UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) – are members and supporters of the Disability Rights and Disarmament Initiative, and DRDI fully and enthusiastically endorses the demand for disability rights to feature as a central, integral dimension of the Convention-making process, begun in 2023 and expected to conclude in 2029. The clock is ticking, and, at the moment – as the new article details – the voices and concerns of persons with disabilities are not being heard or heeded. As the authors note:
A dedicated Convention on Crimes against Humanity would serve several purposes in respect of a range of issues, including those based on disability: it would harmonize inconsistent national laws; clarify and expand definitions from the Rome Statute [of the International Criminal Court]; establish an explicit prevention obligation; and formalize a duty to prosecute or extradite. But its most consequential contribution may be stimulating accountability and reparations at both international and domestic levels, where persons with disabilities deserve and urgently require recognition as victims of such violations.
Despite the comprehensive elaboration and enumeration of disability rights in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), now nearly twenty years old, the current draft is (ironically, given its noble purpose and intent) guilty of “replicating historic silence” with regard to a wide range of crimes against humanity directed at persons with disabilities: a silence haunting the post-World War Two Nuremberg prosecutions of Nazi war criminals – despite, for example, the Nazi ‘Aktion T4’ program targeting millions, and killing at 250,000, of persons with disabilities – and the 1998 Rome Statute. As the authors note, in adamant alarm: “The crimes against humanity treaty process now before the Sixth Committee is the third opportunity in less than a century to bring persons with disabilities within the framework of international criminal law. It must be seized.”
Many of the worst crimes against humanity are committed, by states and non-state actors, in situations of armed conflict – situations requiring, as Article 11 of the CRPD makes clear, the protection of persons with disabilities – and in societies scarred and distorted by militarism and the complex of prejudices (racism, sexism, ableism) invariably characterizing cultures of violence and systems of abuse and impunity. For this reason, the prevention of war and armed violence through disarmament and non-proliferation has a vital role to play in realizing the potential of initiatives like the prospective Convention, helping in the construction not just a formidable legal edifice but a culture of peace and justice, allowing for the diversion of financial and human resources from killing to caring, endangering to empowering. But for the potential of both international law and disarmament to be realized, persons with disabilities need to be centralized, not marginalized, in discussions and decisions that that can enrich and improve.
June 8, 2026: Making the Milestone Count: The Twentieth Anniversary of Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
Statement by the Disability Rights and Disarmament Initiative (DRDI)
The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 12 December, 2006. Entering into force on 3 May, 2008, and now with 192 States Parties, the Convention creates no new rights but rather definitively establishes – on the basis of the UN’s Charter, Declaration of Human Rights, and International Covenants on Human Rights – rights-based and social models of disability in place of traditional medical and charitable models. “Concerned,” as its Preamble notes, “that, despite these various instruments and undertakings, persons with disabilities continue to face barriers in their participation as equal members of society and violations of their human rights in all parts of the world,” the Convention sets the stage for a new era of disability-inclusivity in mainstream society, rooted in the primacy of agency and autonomy and reflecting the full and deep diversity of the human family as a whole, and the disability community itself.
As the annual Conference of States Parties (COSP) to the CRPD meets (June 9-11) to mark the anniversary, honour those who worked so hard to make the Convention possible, review its successes, register its shortcomings, and identify key challenges, the Disability Rights and Disarmament Initiative (DRDI) pledges its support for efforts to fulfil the empowering potential of the Convention in all areas of political, social, economic and cultural life, including in one area of fundamental importance to the United Nations and the future of humanity: disarmament.
Since late 2023, our Initiative has forged new connections between the disarmament and disability rights communities, united in a determination to raise the woefully – and illogically – low profile of disability rights and issues in disarmament spaces, particularly in the UN First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, annually entrusted with reviewing and advancing efforts to prohibit and regulate weapons (from handguns to H-Bombs) and practices of war causing and compounding a wide range of disabilities on a vast scale.
Although the CRPD, particularly Article 11, has inspired efforts – most notably Security Council Resolution 2475 (2019) – with regard to the protection of persons with disabilities in armed conflict, our view is that this agenda must encompass efforts to protect persons with disabilities from armed conflict, including through the most effective means of conflict prevention yet devised: disarmament. In addition to saving lives, disarmament saves money, deploying financial and human resources in ways making lives, all lives, more livable and rewarding.
This switch from war to peace, conflict to cooperation, is the basic paradigm-shift envisioned in the UN Charter, Article 26 especially, as well as being central to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG 16 on Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. Disarmament is crucial in lending strength (and sustainability) to that kind of strength-through-peace must come in part through disarmament; and our belief is that – complementing the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) and Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agendas of recent decades – a Disability, Peace and Security (DPS) agenda is crucial to lending strength, indeed revitalizing the flagging fortunes, of 21st century disarmament.
On the basis of our first few years of working to make disability visible as a priority issue in disarmament spaces – the First Committee, the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TNPW), and others – we believe that the CRPD holds the key to our success moving forward. The case for aligning disarmament diplomacy with the rights-based and social approach and obligations of the Convention is one that an increasing number of states, from diverse regions, are taking seriously, and even find compelling. The problem, hitherto, has been that – with a few exceptions like the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), an accord in part by the CRPD’s adoption – disability rights have not been on the disarmament radar, leaving persons with disabilities very far from the disarmament table.
We issue this statement in the hope that not only will it further raise consciousness of the CRPD in the disarmament diplomacy community, but that it will also raise the profile of disarmament issues within the disability rights and CRPD community. In advance of the anniversary COSP, the International Disability Alliance (IDA), launched a campaign, ‘Let’s Make It Ours’, “bringing together voices from across the disability movement to reflect on achievements, confront remaining gaps, and help shape the future.” Similarly, as a coalition of disability and disarmament advocates and stakeholders, we are convinced that bringing disability into the centre from the margins of disarmament would fill one of the most important, currently glaring ‘gaps,’ in a manner enabling all of humanity to more effectively confront some of the worst threats we all face.
Conversely, a recent guide on ‘Advancing Humanitarian Disarmament: Strategies for Campaigning in Challenging Times’, issued by the Harvard International Human Rights Clinic and partners, urged campaigns to “build partnerships with movements focused on related issues to highlight intersections, and reach new audiences.” “The racial justice and environmental movements,” the guide argues, “both share concerns with humanitarian disarmament campaigns,” with one terrifying new topic being autonomous weapons (and related surveillance-tech) that “threaten to discriminate by race as well as other statuses due to algorithmic biases.” As many disability rights activists are warning, disability is one of those “other statuses,” deserving to be named and foregrounded, just as disability deserves recognition as a vital dimension of the search for racial and climate justice.
The world needs a new, disability-inclusive disarmament diplomacy: it’s not good enough to say ‘give peace a chance’ without giving everyone a say in shaping what that peace might be, and a chance to help design and build it.
May 2, 2026: Article on Disability Rights and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)
The article (Cascades of Harm, Cascades of Care: Disability Rights and Nuclear (In)justice) by Dr. Sean Howard and Dr. Tammy Bernasky, appeared in NPT News in Review (Vol 21., No. 2), published by the Reaching Critical Will programme of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Entitled ‘Cascades of Harm, Cascades of Care: Disability Rights and Nuclear (In)justice,’ the piece recommends that delegates attending the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference being held at the UN in New York from April 27-May 22 adopt a rights-based, disability-inclusive approach to addressing the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear use, testing, and violence. As the authors argue: “Rather than simply “looking after” persons whose disabilities are caused or compounded by nuclear violence, care must be taken to ensure that their rights—alongside those of other affected individuals and communities—are placed at the centre of relevant decision- and policy-making processes.”
March 14, 2026: Article on ‘Importing Disability Rights into the Arms Trade Treaty’
The article (Importing Disability Rights into the Arms Trade Treaty) by Dr. Sean Howard and Dr. Tammy Bernasky, published on the ‘Disarmament Dialogue’ section on the Humanitarian Disarmament website, is the first contribution by the Disability Rights and Disarmament Initiative (DRDI) to the review and implementation of the 2014 Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). Timed to coincide with meetings of the treaty’s three Working Groups in Geneva March 16-18, the article makes the case for disability rights, perspectives, and inclusion to be integrated into the treaty’s inaugural 5-Year Plan, currently under consideration and due to be adopted by the ATT’s 116 member states in 2027. Long overdue, such disability mainstreaming, Howard and Bernasky argue, is not only a moral imperative for a treaty dedicated to “reducing human suffering”, but can help advance the ATT’s core aims and objectives, strengthening the case for its universalization and thus effectiveness as ban on the irresponsible arms transfers currently fueling so many conflicts.
November 3, 2025: Scientific Advisory Group of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) Holds Landmark Session on Disability Rights
At the request of the Disability Rights and Disarmament Initiative, the TPNW’s Scientific Advisory Group (SAG) convened a session on disability rights in relation to the implementation and review of the treaty’s efforts to redress the historic and ongoing impacts and harms of nuclear use and testing.
The session, chaired by Dr. Zia Mian of Princeton University, heard first from Dr. Tammy Bernasky, who outlined the central importance of the Convention on the Rights and Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in ensuring the maximum meaningful inclusion and participation of persons with disabilities in the design and provision of victim assistance programmes, in alignment with the Convention’s rights-based approach and social model.
Dr. Sean Howard then placed the issue of disability rights in the TPNW in the broader context of disability rights and disarmament across the UN system, arguing that addressing the topic seriously had the potential to increase awareness of, and support for, humanitarian disarmament treaties such as the TPNW. Howard also made an appeal for ‘expertise’ in addressing nuclear impacts – especially in the work of the SAG – to be defined expansively enough to include persons with disabilities caused and/or compounded by nuclear violence who may not have had the opportunity to attain high academic and scientific qualifications. To exclude them from the process of assessing their own experience, needs, and priorities, he argued, would be a grave disservice in violation of the CRPD.
A constructive, supportive, and wide-ranging discussion followed. For more information on the SAG’s work, including the November 3 session, please see here.
