JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION, INDIA VOL. 21, 2022 Ministry for vetting.1 This article is, therefore, limiting its attention to the two legislations —namely, Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 (RPDA) and the Mental Health Care Act, 2017 (MHCA), which addressed the issue of legal capacity and were duly enacted by the Indian Parliament. Since the article is aimed at assessing the extent to which the two enactments meet the CRPD mandate, the first section of the article spells out the mandate of the CRPD. Next, it looks at how legal capacity has been addressed by the RPDA and the Rules issued under the Act by the Union and the states. The following section undertakes a similar exercise in relation to the MHCA. In the last section, the focus shifts to the imbroglio created by the two statutes and reflects on ways of resolving the problem so that India respects both — the rights of its people with disabilities and fulfils its international obligations. 2. The Right to Legal Capacity in the CRPD When Article 12 of the CRPD asserts that persons with disabilities have equal recognition before the law, it firstly clarifies that disability cannot cause deprivation of personhood. The Anglo-American jurisprudence makes this recognition of legal personhood a prerequisite to the possession of legal capacity.2 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as also the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) had expressly acknowledged the legal personhood of all humans.3 Article 12(1) of the CRPD, by reaffirming that persons with disabilities have the right to recognition everywhere as persons before the law, clarifies that the personhood of persons with disabilities was never in question. With Article 12(1) declaring that the prerequisite for possessing legal capacity stands satisfied, Article 12(2) obligates all state parties to recognise that “persons with disabilities enjoy legal capacity on an equal basis with others in all aspects of life”. To possess legal capacity means to be both a bearer of rights and duties and to have the agency to exercise those rights and duties. Even as some early jurisprudence ruled that persons with disabilities could not be bearers of rights, that disqualification was progressively dropped.4 1 2 3 4 32 For the text of these legislative proposals, see https://disabilitystudiesnalsar.org/nt.php (last visited 27 Oct. 2022). Roscoe Pound Jurisprudence Vol. IV pp 191-405 (Law Book Exchange Ltd. 2000) Article 7 of the UDHR and Article 26 of ICCPR. supra note 2