The Right to Sport and Culture

Discrimination in the area of cultural life is a global phenomenon that takes on many forms.

Cultural venues are all too often inaccessible to persons with disabilities, denying them their right to participate in cultural life as direct participants and as spectators.

Even the most basic activities that should be readily open to all people in a community are often unavailable to community members with disabilities. For example, people who use wheelchairs are sometimes denied entry to movie theatres on the basis that their wheelchairs present a fire hazard for other participants.

Tourism facilities around the world are full of barriers that restrict movement or prevent access altogether. Hotels have few, if any, accessible rooms and do not provide accessible signage for persons with visual impairments. Tour buses are rarely able to accommodate wheelchair users.

Restaurants have been known to refuse to serve persons with intellectual disabilities.

Television programming and other technology allowing people to access culture and sport is not made accessible for persons who are deaf.

Around the world, persons with disabilities experience discrimination and exclusion from active participation in sport, recreation, and leisure activities.

Social and communication barriers prevent persons with disabilities from participating as athletes and as spectators because of negative attitudes and lack of access to information about sporting opportunities.

Physical barriers prevent persons with disabilities from accessing sporting facilities and venues.

Legal and policy barriers may also lead to exclusion. For example, many universities and schools do not have policies of inclusion for allowing students with disabilities to participate in sport, and coaches have no idea how to adapt sport for athletes with disabilities.

Children with disabilities often face numerous barriers in accessing their rights to sport, recreation, and play. At the same time, many disability organizations have successfully worked to open up opportunities for children with disabilities through the development of adaptive physical education programming in schools or community-based efforts to build accessible playgrounds.

According to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD):

1. States recognize the right of persons with disabilities to take part on an equal basis with others in cultural life, and shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that persons with disabilities:

   1. Enjoy access to cultural materials in accessible formats;
   2. Enjoy access to television programs, films, theatre, and other cultural activities, in accessible formats;
   3. Enjoy access to places for cultural performances or services, such as theatres, museums, cinemas, libraries, and tourism services, and, as far as possible, enjoy access to monuments and sites of national cultural importance.

2. States shall take appropriate measures to enable persons with disabilities to have the opportunity to develop and utilize their creative, artistic and intellectual potential, not only for their own benefit, but also for the enrichment of society. This recognizes that persons with disabilities are full participants in the cultural life of their communities as, for example, artists, musicians, scholars, and actors.
3. States shall take all appropriate steps, in accordance with international law, to ensure that laws protecting intellectual property rights do not constitute an unreasonable or discriminatory barrier to access by persons with disabilities to cultural materials. The duty of States to ensure that laws protecting intellectual property rights do not present unreasonable or discriminatory barriers in access to cultural materials by persons with disabilities includes, for example, translating books and other material into Braille, providing audio-cassettes or providing sign language or forms of accessible technology for artistic performances.
4. Persons with disabilities shall be entitled, on an equal basis with others, to recognition and support of their specific cultural and linguistic identity, including sign languages and deaf culture. This includes, for example, the right to use sign language and the recognition and support of deaf culture. It respects the dignity of persons with disabilities who see themselves as part of a cultural or language minority, such as some members of the deaf community.

5. With a view to enabling persons with disabilities to participate on an equal basis with others in recreational, leisure and sporting activities, States shall take appropriate measures:

   1. To encourage and promote the participation, to the fullest extent possible, of persons with disabilities in mainstream sporting activities at all levels;
   2. To ensure that persons with disabilities have an opportunity to organize, develop and participate in disability-specific sporting and recreational activities and, to this end, encourage the provision, on an equal basis with others, of appropriate instruction, training and resources;
   3. To ensure that persons with disabilities have access to sporting, recreational, and tourism venues;
   4. To ensure that children with disabilities have equal access with other children to participation in play, recreation, and leisure and sporting activities, including those activities in the school system. This also includes access to playgrounds in the community and adaptive physical education in schools;
   5. To ensure that persons with disabilities have access to services from those involved in the organization of recreational, tourism, leisure, and sporting activities.

This approach favours an inclusive approach to programming, where persons with disabilities have equal access to sport and recreational facilities (for example, community swimming pools and adaptive playgrounds) and have opportunities for participation in both disability-specific sport and recreation (such as wheelchair basketball) and mainstream sport programming.