Timeline of disability rights outside the United States

This disability rights timeline lists events outside the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan relating to the civil rights of people with disabilities, including court decisions, the passage of legislation, activists' actions, significant abuses of people with disabilities, and the founding of various organizations. Although the disability rights movement itself began in the 1960s, advocacy for the rights of people with disabilities started much earlier and continues to the present.

Prior to the 1700s Ancient Greece – A pharmakós (, plural pharmakoi) in ancient Greek religion was the ritualistic sacrifice or exile of a human scapegoat or victim. A physically disabled person, a slave or a criminal was chosen and expelled from the community at times of disaster (famine, invasion or plague) or at times of calendrical crisis. It was believed that this would bring about purification. On the first day of the Thargelia, a festival of Apollo at Athens, two men, the Pharmakoi, were led out as if to be sacrificed as an expiation. Some scholia state that pharmakoi were actually sacrificed (thrown from a cliff or burned), but many modern scholars reject this, arguing that the earliest source for the pharmakos (the iambic satirist Hipponax) shows the pharmakoi being beaten and stoned, but not executed. A more plausible explanation would be that sometimes they were executed and sometimes not, depending on the attitude of the victim. For instance, a deliberate unrepentant murderer would most likely be put to death.

1700s 1729 – In 1729 punishment was recommended for people with physical disabilities, whether they were born with disabilities or acquired them later in life, who appeared in public. These concepts were covered by what were colloquially known as "Ugly Laws".

1800s 1817 – The Asylums for Lunatic Poor (Ireland) Act 1817 (57 Geo. 3. c. 106) made legislative provisions of public asylums for all of Ireland. 1871 – The Lunacy Regulation (Ireland) Act 1871 was created to manage and protect the estate of "lunatics". It was repealed by the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Bill 2013.

1900s 1902 – From the early 1880s until the 1970s, American cities had unsightly beggar ordinances known colloquially as ugly laws. These laws deemed it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself to public view." In 1902, an ugly law similar to that of the United States was enacted in the City of Manila in the Philippines. This law was similar to those of the United States, being written in English and during a time when Manila was under American control, and included the common phrasing "no person who is diseased". This was one of the first ordinances to be written under American control. Other ordinances dealt with hygiene reform and considered unsightly beggars part of this indicative. 1909 – Regulations were introduced at the Cantonal Asylum in Bern, which allowed those deemed 'unfit' and with strong sexual inclinations, including some disabled people, to be mandatorily sterilized. In a particular instance, several men and women, including epileptics, were castrated, some of whom voluntarily requested it.

1930s 1933 – The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring (Ger. "Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses") or "Sterilisation Law" was a statute in Nazi Germany enacted on July 14, 1933 (and made active in January 1934)... made active: IBM and the Holocaust, Edwin Black, 2001 Crown / Random House, p 93 which allowed the compulsory sterilisation of any citizen who in the opinion of a "Genetic Health Court" (Gr. Erbgesundheitsgericht) had a list of alleged genetic disorders – many of which were not, in fact, genetic. The elaborate interpretive commentary on the law was written by three dominant figures in the racial hygiene movement: Ernst Rüdin, Arthur Gütt and the lawyer Falk Ruttke. The law itself was based on a 'model' American law developed by Harry H. Laughlin. There were three amendments by 1935, most making minor adjustments to how the statute operated or clarifying bureaucratic aspects (such as who paid for the operations). The most significant changes allowed the Higher Court to renounce a patient's right to appeal, and to fine physicians who did not report patients who they knew would qualify for sterilisation under the law. Along with the law, Adolf Hitler personally decriminalised abortion in case of fetuses having racial or hereditary defects for doctors, while the abortion of healthy "pure" German, "Aryan" unborn remained strictly forbidden.Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of Northern Carolina Press, 1995): 30. Via Google Books. 1934 – 1975: Compulsory sterilisation in Sweden (Swedish: Tvångssterilisering i Sverige) occurred between 1934 and 1975. Originally the aim of the sterilisation policy was to protect society and it targeted the so-called feeble-minded or other individuals who were considered unfit; from the 1950s and onwards the law came to be used mostly in the interest of the individual, for social or medical reasons, under varying degrees of pressure from doctors and social workers. Two indications for compulsory sterilisation were:page 30 Steriliseringsfrågan i Sverige 1935–1975 , SOU 2000:20, in Swedish with an English summary. 1. Eugenic indication meant sterilisation could be done if a person's offspring would receive undesired genes for insanity, severe illness or physical handicap of other kind. 2. Social indication allowed sterilisation for someone evidently unsuitable to foster a child due to mental illness, being feebleminded or other distortion of the psyche, or having an asocial lifestyle. According to the 2000 governmental report, 21,000 people were estimated to have been forcibly sterilised, and 6,000 were coerced into a 'voluntary' sterilisation while the nature of a further 4,000 cases could not be determined.Steriliseringsfrågan i Sverige 1935 – 1975 , SOU 2000:20, in Swedish with an English summary. The Swedish state subsequently paid out damages to victims who contacted the authorities and asked for compensation. 1939 – 1945: Aktion T4 (German, ) was the postwar designation for a programme of mass murder through involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany,Sandner, Peter (July 1999). "Die "Euthanasie"-Akten im Bundesarchiv. Zur Geschichte eines lange verschollenen Bestandes" [The 'Euthanasia' Files in the Federal Archives. On the History of a Long Lost Existence] (PDF). pg. 385. Vierteljahrschefte für Zeitgeschichte – Institut für Zeitgeschichte. Munich. 47 (3): 385–400. . which ran officially from September 1939 to August 1941, during which the recorded 70,273 people were killed at various extermination centres located at psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, along with those in occupied Poland.Longerich, P. (2010). Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. pg. 477. Oxford: Oxford University Press. .Browning, Christopher (2005). The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942. p. 193. Arrow. .Proctor, Robert N. (1988). Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. p. 191. Cambridge, MA: Harvard College. . About half of the victims were from church-run asylums. Under the programme certain German physicians were authorized to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death" ().Proctor, Robert N. (1988). Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. p. 177. Cambridge, MA: Harvard College. . In October 1939 Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia decree" backdated to 1 September 1939 that authorized Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the chief of his Chancellery, (not the Reich Chancellery Reichskanzlei) and Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, to carry out the killing. After the nominal end of the programme, physicians in German and Austrian facilities continued many of the practices of Aktion T4, until the defeat of Germany in 1945.Ryan, Donna F.; Schuchman, John S. (2002). Racial Hygiene: Deaf People in Hitler's Europe.pg. 25. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press. .Ryan, Donna F.; Schuchman, John S. (2002). Racial Hygiene: Deaf People in Hitler's Europe. pg. 62. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press. .Lifton, R. J. (1986). The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. pg. 142. New York: Basic Books. . Robert Lifton and Michael Burleigh estimated that twice the official number of T4 victims may have perished before the end of the war.Burleigh, Michael (1995). Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany 1900–1945. New York: Verlag Klemm & Oelschläger. . The estimated range now is between 200,000 and 250,000 unofficial victims of the policy upon the arrival of Allied troops in Germany.

1940s 1945 – 1955: The Vipeholm experiments were a series of human experiments where patients of Vipeholm Hospital for intellectually disabled people in Lund, Sweden, were fed large amounts of sweets to provoke dental caries (1945–1955). The experiments were sponsored both by the sugar industry and the dentist community, in an effort to determine whether carbohydrates affected the formation of cavities. The experiments provided extensive knowledge about dental health and resulted in enough empirical data to link the intake of sugar to dental caries. However, today they are considered to have violated the principles of medical ethics. 1946 – In this year, newly reconstructed German courts tried members of the Hadamar psychiatric hospital staff for the murders of nearly 15,000 German citizens at the facility. Adolf Wahlmann and Irmgard Huber, the chief physician and the head nurse, were convicted. 1948 – In December 1946 an American military tribunal (commonly called the Doctors' trial) prosecuted 23 German doctors and administrators for their roles in war crimes and crimes against humanity. These crimes included the systematic killing of those deemed "unworthy of life", including people who had mental disabilities, were institutionalized for their mentally ill, and who had physical impairments. After 140 days of proceedings, including the testimony of 85 witnesses and the submission of 1,500 documents, in August 1947 the court pronounced 16 of the defendants guilty. Seven were sentenced to death and executed on 2 June 1948.

1950s 1950 – The USSR officially banned the procedure of lobotomy in 1950,USSR Ministry of Health. Приказ МЗ СССР 1003 (9 декабря 1950) [Order 1003 (9 December 1950)]. Невропатология и психиатрия [Neuropathology and Psychiatry]. 1951;20(1):17–18. Russian. on the initiative of Vasily Gilyarovsky.Gilyarovsky, Vasily [Гиляровский, Василий]. Избранные труды [Selected Works]. Moscow: Медицина [Medicine]; 1973. Russian. p. 4. 1954 - World Leprosy Day was started in 1954 to draw awareness to those affected by leprosy. 1960s