Accounting for the performance gap: human rights treaty obligations and the right to work for persons with disabilities in Timor-Leste

This article examines the relationship between international treaty obligations and domestic outcomes through the right to work for persons with disabilities in Timor-Leste. Combining doctrinal analysis of Timor-Leste's treaty reporting with fieldwork, field observations, stakeholder interviews and an n = 1000 community survey, we read a single case against the scholarship on human rights treaty effectiveness. Our contribution to that scholarship is to ask, in relation to this case, whether the gap between commitment and outcome is better explained by want of capacity or lack of political will. Although Timor-Leste has embraced substantial commitments - including the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol - we find a serious and persistent gap between those commitments and the lived experience of persons with disabilities. Capacity constraints are real, and account for part of that gap. But the failure to undertake feasible, low-cost reforms and the unwarranted retention of discriminatory measures point to a deficit of political will sustained by entrenched social attitudes. The case underscores the need for frameworks of treaty effectiveness that accommodate the interaction of capacity, will and social attitude while attentive to the particular difficulties faced by states in the Global South in implementing socio-economic rights.