The Right to Care and Disability in Latin America

On Aug. 7, 2025, with Advisory Opinion OC-31/25, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights took a decisive step by becoming the first international court to recognize the human right to care as an autonomous right. The Court defined care as “the set of actions necessary to preserve human well-being,” reaffirming it as a basic condition for the effective exercise of human rights from a human-interdependence perspective. In this sense, the decision is particularly relevant to the field of disability, as it moves beyond assistance-based approaches, advancing to a framework centered on autonomy and support. 

The right to care comprises three interrelated elements: the right to care for others, the right to receive care, and the right to self-care. This tripartite understanding follows Laura Pautassi’s pioneer work, presented before the X Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2007. There, Pautassi demonstrated that, through a human rights-based approach, care was already embedded in international human rights treaties and declarations, even when not explicitly named as such, insofar as it informed the scope and content of other social rights.

From that moment onward, different regional instruments progressively consolidated care as an autonomous human right: the Quito Consensus of 2007 placed care at the center of gender equality, and the Brasilia Consensus of 2010 expressly recognized it as a universal right, accessible to all people throughout their life cycles, including people with disabilities. Subsequent instruments (such as the Inter-American Convention on the Human Rights of Older Persons, the first binding instrument to explicitly recognize it, and the Buenos Aires Commitment, which addresses the three dimensions of care) reaffirmed this process.

Against this background, the Inter-American Court’s recognition of the right to care in OC-31/25 did not emerge unexpectedly. On the contrary, for nearly two decades, regional, academic, and political processes in Latin America have consolidated the notion of care as a human right. Within this consolidated regional context, on Jan. 23, 2023, the State of Argentina (through the then-existing Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity) requested the Inter-American Court to determine whether the human right to care could be understood as an autonomous right within the framework of the American Convention on Human Rights and, consequently, enforceable. 

This request built upon prior developments in the Court’s jurisprudence, which had already established important precedents regarding the justiciability of social rights under Article 26 of the American Convention. Cases such as Poblete Vilches et al. v. Chile and Cuscul Pivaral et al. v. Guatemala, concerning the right to health, as well as Lhaka Honhat v. Argentina regarding the right to water, are some of the main examples.

The advisory process also revealed a significant degree of consensus regarding the autonomy of the right to care. Fom the 129 amicus curiae briefs submitted to the Court, only eight opposed the recognition of the autonomy of the right to care. Moreover, all States that submitted written observations — Ecuador, Costa Rica, Panama, Chile, Paraguay, Colombia, and Mexico — expressly supported its existence. 

The Inter-American Court ultimately affirmed the autonomy of the right to care within the American Convention and identified three guiding principles for its interpretation: 

• co-responsibility, which distributes caregiving obligations among the State, families, the market, and society;
• equality and non-discrimination, aimed at challenging gendered caregiving roles; 
• and solidarity, grounded in the recognition of human interdependence and the rejection of paternalistic approaches.

These principles form the normative framework through which the Court assesses State obligations under the right to care, particularly in contexts characterized by structural inequality and historical exclusion. It is within this framework that the implications of recognizing care as an autonomous right are especially tested in the field of disability.

Indeed, although disability is one of the categories of special protection under the American Convention, persons living with disabilities continue to be understood as passive recipients of care. This view reproduces the ableist logic that continues to be present in regulatory implementation and regional public policies, as demanded by the movements of persons with disabilities. 

Fortunately, the Advisory Opinion affirmed that the paternalist paradigm is contrary to human rights and that the notion of support should be adopted as the guiding principle of the right to care in the field of disability. Unlike traditional assistance, supports imply full recognition of people’s agency, the need to adapt provision to their individual preferences, and the definitive abandonment of standardized solutions. As Judge Patricia Pérez-Goldberg points out, “support is not mere assistance, but a service aimed at enabling personal autonomy, full participation, and independent living, recognized as a cross-cutting obligation throughout the treaty.” 

Further, based on the paradigm of the universal human right to care, the Inter-American Court challenges the narrow view that links persons with disabilities solely to one of its dimensions — the right to receive care. On the contrary, as full subjects of rights, persons with disabilities are entitled to all three dimensions of care, including the right to provide care and the right to self-care. Thus, states are obliged to adopt measures that guarantee this right in a comprehensive manner for all persons. 

In short, OC-31/25 constitutes a powerful tool for continuing to promote structural transformations that break the social power relations that have kept persons with disabilities on the margins of full citizenship. The slogan “Nothing about us without us,” coined more than 50 years ago by the disability rights movement, is embedded throughout the opinion which recognizes the agency, autonomy, and right to participate in defining what sustains life in common.