This chapter evaluates what the international and European human rights frameworks can offer, in terms of standard setting and avenues for international legal development and protection, to those irregular migrants who experience either mental health difficulties or have a psychosocial disability. The analysis in this chapter extends the normative frames of references to encompass ‘disability’, which is reconceptualised in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as a transformative status and a human rights argument. This chapter triangulates human rights, public health and disability-sensitive arguments to assess the relations between mental health and human rights in the context of irregular migration in human rights law and jurisprudence. While the European Court of Human Rights’ deportation cases concerning people with mental health issues tend to reflect an overall emergency-oriented and predominantly biomedical approach to mental health, several UN human rights treaty bodies set out a more holistic conceptualisation of mental health and psychosocial disability. The latter approach promotes non-discriminatory psychosocial interventions to guarantee access to community-based mental health care services and the underlying determinants of mental health for everyone regardless of migration status.

This chapter will introduce the CRPD Committee and analyse the extent to which the Committee has identified the presence of hierarchies at work. It will first introduce the CRPD Committee, then Sections II–IV will analyse its jurisprudence. Section II will analyse the Concluding Observations (COs) on States Parties to the CRPD to illustrate how the CRPD Committee accepts that there is a hierarchy of impairments in law and practice and that is having a tangible impact upon how the right to work is exercised by different impairment groups. While the CRPD Committee’s critique of the hierarchy of impairments at work is positive, there are substantial inconsistencies across COs. The CRPD Committee aims to have ability equality mainstreamed, and disability apartheid abolished; to advance this agenda, the CRPD Committee should ensure consistency across COs to empower those on the right side of the disability debate.

When workplaces are designed and managed for a worker with a 'normal' range of abilities, then workers with different abilities are disabled at work. Human rights and anti-discrimination laws create duties upon employers and others to adjust workplaces to accommodate workers with disabilities. This chapter argues that reasonable accommodation and adjustment laws privilege workers with physical and sensory impairments compared to workers who have psychosocial disabilities. Workers with invisible psychosocial disabilities are victimised if they disclose their disability and the law is comparatively less likely to recognise the request of a worker with a psychosocial disability as reasonable. The failure by law and work practices to address ableism at work perpetuates a hierarchy of impairments, which leaves workers with psychosocial disabilities unable to exercise their right to work on an equal basis as workers without disabilities, or with less stigmatised impairments.