Temporal disruptions in the UNCRPD: an untimely future for legal capacity?

Clough, Beverley ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7640-1378 (2025) Temporal disruptions in the UNCRPD: an untimely future for legal capacity? Human Rights Law Review, 25 (2). ngaf007. ISSN 1461-7781

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Abstract

This paper utilizes the conceptual tools offered by scholarship on temporality and extends their use through engaging with disability, legal capacity and the CRPD. Surfacing these temporal issues in light of the work of human rights scholars such as McNeilly, and the call to think through human rights in a way that it ‘untimely’ offers two key insights for human rights scholarship and for disability law, particularly in the context of mental capacity. Firstly, it opens up novel sites for critical attention directed at routes for progressive change, moving beyond the stagnant and fixed temporalities of current debates. Secondly, at a conceptual level it begins a dynamic conversation between critical disability scholarship and human rights scholarship, demonstrating the importance of being attentive to the temporalities underpinning legal frameworks and the ableist ideas that may inhabit these. Disability studies has the potential to disrupt temporalities and underpinning ideas of time in capacity law, disability law, and human rights frameworks beyond disability.