Meet Our Experts | Samaneh Shabani

When the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities adopts General Comment No. 3 on women and girls with disabilities, opening up the intersectionality of gender and disability, it triggers in me another deeply cherished value: justice. That is how the core idea of my dissertation took shape, and I found myself writing about domestic violence against women and girls with disabilities and their access to justice in international human rights law, with a focus on Iran. This later became the title of my book, published in Persian in 2021.

I wanted to be in the room, not only on the shelf.

My first home in activism was the Disability Association of Tavana, an organisation of persons with disabilities in Iran. I worked as a legal consultant and researcher there, translating the CRPD and the Sustainable Development Goals into training that staff and member organisations could actually use. It was the first time my research left the page and became something people could utilize into their own advocacy.

From there, I moved into a UN consultancy with UNDP, back in Iran, to help build a national plan for disability inclusion — a plan with signatures on it, not just recommendations. Government representatives, UN agencies, and organisations of persons with disabilities sat at the same table for this. For the first time, I watched an idea I had researched turn into a document that institutions were actually held accountable to. In that period, I also completed a fellowship with the Center for Inclusive Policy, where my research focused on community support services in higher education in Iran. CIP became something like a home, and even now, as former fellows, we keep learning from each other.

It was only after this that I joined the European Disability Forum, in Brussels, as Women's Rights Officer. There, I wrote the organisation's third manifesto on the rights of women and girls with disabilities. Its core idea was leadership, not representation: not simply including women with disabilities in existing structures, but recognising them as the ones who should be leading the conversation about their own rights. This is also where I learned something harder to accept: the distance we still need to travel is not only outside the disability rights movement, but inside it too. Organisations built to represent persons with disabilities can still leave women, and their leadership, in the background. Fixing that is not someone else's task. It is ours.

It is also in Brussels that my work took its current shape. Today, I work as a Senior Consultant with Agile Development Consulting — a consultant, trainer, and strategic advisor on gender equality and disability inclusion, doing research, monitoring and evaluation, and strategy planning. Alongside this, I also work part-time on digital accessibility with the European Commission, which keeps the geek in me quietly happy. I am also a certified trainer with the International Labour Organization.

We don't wait for the flame. We become it.

There is an old story, The Old Street Lamp, about a lamp that carries magic inside it for a lifetime — magic no one notices until the very end, almost by accident. I used to read it as a story about patience. I no longer do.