Article 46 Reservations

This chapter examines Article 46 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which deals with the issue of reservations. Reservations are a common feature of multilateral treaties, although there are calls to reduce their frequency or volume in human rights or treaties of a humanitarian nature. The legal effect of a reservation is to exclude or modify the binding nature of a treaty provision for the reserving state. In the context of a universal human rights treaty this entails several dangers. For one thing, since the CRPD claims not to create new rights but instead relies on existing ones, any reservation thereto will automatically constitute a regression on entrenched rights, something that is unacceptable. In equal manner, since the vast majority of the ‘existing’ rights in the CRPD are also part of customary international law, reservations thereto will negate customary obligations, which is again unacceptable.