So welcome to this week's lunchtime seminar.

Thank you all for coming on today and it's an enormous pleasure to welcome Dr.

Arlenore, the University of Goldway and the Bannar is one of the leading experts on the UN's convention on the right of

disabilities in her 2011 book was Kim from University Press, explored the agreement of that convention and its implementation, particularly with reference to Europe, through the European Union.

Very important example for the EU because the first international agreement to which the EU itself was a

state party to the Convention and subsequent work is the implementation of the Convention's application.

And our project that she's working on now is a new fascinating

project funded by the European Research Council that's a kind of much more kind of

bottom-up project of looking at the experiences of all people with disabilities and

the narratives that emerge from your stories

and how that will interact with law in some ways and we're really looking forward to hearing

you talk about this new project I know it's in these early stages just a little bit unfair

in some ways to ask you to talk about it but I think it'll give you a really

interesting strong flavour of the kind or interesting kind of interdisciplinary work that can be done within a

European framework so I thank you so much for coming today thanks very much Kenneth so I'll be talking today

about my ERC project which is called the Voices

Project. So the acronym stands for voices of individuals collectively exploring self-determination.

And as Kenneth said, I'm exploring how the lived experience of people with disabilities,

whether they've been denied the right to make legally binding decisions for themselves or whether they've managed to make those decisions

sometimes against the odds. What can that tell us about what we need to be doing in our law

reform projects around the world and in Europe in particular to change the way in which the law

responds to some of these difficult questions of choice and consent and control.

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