Taking Metaregulation to the United Nations Human Rights Treaty Regime: The Case of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

This article argues that regulatory scholarship can be harnessed to promote human rights, in this case the rights of persons with disabilities. It argues that the regulatory regime of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (the Convention) establishes a human rights metaregulatory regime. It shows that the Convention delegates all of the regulatory functions to four different actors, to the effect that no single actor has the full range of regulatory competencies. The implication of this high degree of delegation is that the Convention establishes a three-party framework whereby the interaction between the regulatee and the two regulators is mediated by an oversight body. While organically independent, each actor is functionally interdependent so that an equilibrium is established. At a time where the effectiveness of the UN human rights treaty system is under assault, this article argues that the metaregulatory regime of the CRPD provides an optimistic vision for the future of human rights treaties.