The Right to Leisure for Children with Disabilities: Towards Greater Awareness and Implementation

Byrne, Seamus (2024) The Right to Leisure for Children with Disabilities: Towards Greater Awareness and Implementation. International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure, 7 (4). pp. 369-390. ISSN 2520-8683

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Abstract

Despite the outward international human rights protections which objectively ringfence the right to leisure for children with disabilities, this article will argue that the actual and practical enjoyment of that right has been ineffective in practice. It will be contended that greater awareness and implementation of the right to leisure pursuant to Article 31(1) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (hereafter ‘CRC’), and what that means for children and young people with disabilities, is required to revive the potentially transformative capacity that it can (and could) exert in the context of disabled children’s lives .In doing so, it adopts the CRC, previously classified as the “fulcrum” of children’s rights (Freeman, 2007, 15) as the principal legal backdrop against which to assess the extent to which the right to leisure for children with disabilities is upheld.