Women Enabled International Guide to CRPD General Comment No. 3: Women and Girls with Disabilities

April 2017

This guide to General Comment No. 3 on women and girls with disabilities (GC3) from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD Committee) attempts to pull together the information contained in disparate parts of GC3 on the major themes it covers, including gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and access to justice. This guide also brings together the recommendations that the CRPD Committee makes in GC3 about eliminating discrimination and stereotypes and ensuring equality for women and girls with disabilities.

This guide is divided into six sections (click on the links below to jump to these sections):

• Discrimination, Equality, and the Content of Article 6;
• Respect, Protect, FulQill Framework;
• Stereotypes;
• Gender-based Violence;
• Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR); and
• Access to Justice.

These are the major themes covered by GC3. However, GC3 also addresses other issues, including legal capacity, employment, public participation, and education, among others. The charts below include these issues as they are relevant to the themes above, but GC3 may also contain additional information on these topics and should be directly consulted as needed.

Each section contains a summary paragraph of the material GC3 covers relevant to that theme and a chart containing keywords, paragraph numbers, and excerpted text copied directly from GC3. Some text from GC3 is repeated in several sections. The charts below use the keyword “state obligations” to indicate a direct recommendation to states about the steps they need to take to ensure the rights of women and girls with disabilities. The charts use “SRHR” to refer to sexual and reproductive health and rights.