Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCPD) recognises the equal right to exercise legal capacity without discrimination based on disability, and obliges state parties to ensure access to the support a person may require in exercising it. Since its adoption, there has been a growing body of work critically examining laws which restrict or remove the exercise of legal capacity based on disability. Traditionally, this work has focused on constitutional and legal standards regulating the exercise of legal capacity. However, reforming legal capacity seems to be an all-encompassing enterprise, which requires deeper attention to be paid to its historical, social and legal foundations, as well as the wide array of institutions that it permeates and their internal coherence. Legal Capacity, Disability and Human Rights comprises chapters by key legal scholars and practitioners in the field of legal capacity, disability and human rights from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Oceania and Africa. The book aims to achieve three main goals to address the aforementioned issues. First, to explore the historical evolution, theoretical constructs and institutional features of legal capacity within comparative legal systems and determine the legal and social contours it is taking in current legal reforms. In doing so, the chapters help to reveal the multiple dimensions and institutional arrangements that constitute contemporary regimes of legal capacity. Second, the chapters examine the specific ways in which evolving principles, rights and standards derived from disability law and human rights are impacting and transforming the law of legal capacity and the practice of supporting people to exercise it in jurisdictions around the world. These practices include legal reform processes and landmark judicial decisions. Finally, the book examines emerging and persistent legal questions and challenges in conceiving, designing and implementing more comprehensive reforms in legal capacity regimes, to ensure consistency with the aims of Article 12 of the UNCPD.

Despite national and international commitments to Education for All, and the Millennium Development Goals to assure universal primary education by 2015, over 90% of children with disabilities remain excluded from regular education in countries of the south. This book describes a three decade-long change initiative in India to enable children with disabilities to move from segregation and exclusion to inclusive education, and draws lessons for confronting global exclusion. It examines the barriers to inclusion of children with disabilities in the Indian sub-continent, estimated at 4% of the population, or 40-50 million children, and implications of the systemic failure within a human rights framework. The book concludes with setting this initiative in a broader context of inclusive education development efforts, and identifies lessons it provides for a global development agenda for inclusive education, including the importance of ensuring strategies that are culturally appropriate and context-specific.

Despite national and international commitments to Education for All, and the Millennium Development Goals to assure universal primary education by 2015, over 90% of children with disabilities remain excluded from regular education in countries of the south. This book describes a three decade-long change initiative in India to enable children with disabilities to move from segregation and exclusion to inclusive education, and draws lessons for confronting global exclusion. It examines the barriers to inclusion of children with disabilities in the Indian sub-continent, estimated at 4% of the population, or 40-50 million children, and implications of the systemic failure within a human rights framework. The book concludes with setting this initiative in a broader context of inclusive education development efforts, and identifies lessons it provides for a global development agenda for inclusive education, including the importance of ensuring strategies that are culturally appropriate and context-specific.

The optic canal, in particular its intracranial end, represents a "locus minoris resistentiae" for optic nerve compression in a variety of pathologic conditions. The intracranial optic nerve shares the limited space within this narrow passage with the carotid and ophthalmic artery, all being surrounded by bone and rigid dura. Any pathological condition going along with an increase of soft tissue volume, such as in optic nerve sheath tumors, parasellar neoplasms, dolichoectasia of the carotid and/ or ophthalmic artery, hematomas, etc. , or reduction of the lumen of the bony optic canal by hyperpneumatization of the sphenoid sinus, hyperostosis or developmental abnormalities must act as a space-occupying lesion causing optic nerve compression either by pressing the nerve against the vessel or the neighboring dura or bone. The spectrum of clinical signs and symptoms of optic nerve compression in this area is rather wide and includes acute as well as slowly progressive visual loss and all kinds of visual field defects in the presence of a normal disk, papilledema, pri- mary optic atrophy or cavernous optic atrophy mimicking var- ious clinical disease entities such as retrobulbar optic neuritis, anterior and posterior ischemic optic neuropathy, soft glaucoma and others. Some of the lesions causing optic nerve compression in this area are rather small and need to be visualized or excluded by thin section CT such as pneumosinus dilatans of the sphenoid bone, dolichoectasia of the internal carotid artery, small men- ingiomas around the optic foramen and others.

Die Zwangsstorung gilt als vierthaufigste psychische Storung (die Lebenszeiterkrankung liegt bei 2,5 %). Neuere Forschungsergebnisse weisen auf inhaltliche Beziehungen der Zwangsstorung mit anderen psychischen Storungen hin, die auf einem dimensionalen Kontinuum zwischen Kompulsivitat ("Zwanghaftigkeit") und Impulsivitat ("Dranghaftigkeit") angeordnet werden konnen. Zu diesen sogenannten "Spektrumstorungen" zahlen unter anderem Essstorungen, Kaufrausch, Hypochondrie, Trichotillomanie und selbstschadigendes Verhalten. Neben Epidemiologie, Phanomenologie, Neurobiologie und Diagnostik werden hier vor allem therapeutische Ansatze (medikamentos, psychotherapeutisch) der Zwangsstorung und der oben genannten Spektrumstorungen diskutiert. Das Buch vermittelt Hoffnung in der Behandlung dieser schweren Storung und lange unterschatzten Krankheit und betont einen integrativen Behandlungsansatz."