Introduction to the Research Handbook on EU Disability Law

In the past 20 years, the European Union (EU) has adopted a wide range of legislative measures addressing, to varying degrees, the rights of persons with disabilities. It has also put forward various policy initiatives to complement, as well as to boost the effects of, those measures. Well-established scholarship has highlighted that the major drivers of the development of this complex net of EU legislation and policies were,1 first, the entry into force of the Treaty of Amsterdam, and second, the conclusion by the EU2 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD or UN Convention).3 Before 1999, the former European Community (EC) had addressed disability mainly through the use of soft law and by means of programmes aimed at supporting Member States’ actions.4 The Treaty of Amsterdam conferred a sound competence on the EC to combat, inter alia, disability discrimination, by virtue of Article 13 EC (now Article 19 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union – TFEU). This constitutional change prompted the adoption of Directive 2000/78/EC,5 establishing a general framework for equal treatment in