Legal Updates on Exchange Participants with Disabilities
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What's New,
NCDE News
Updates have been made to some of MIUSA's legal references about the "presumption against extraterritoriality" in U.S. federal disability rights laws and implications for study abroad and international students.
Points highlighted in the two 2010 updates on Americans going abroad and international participants to the United States, summarized from a memo from the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, include:
- American schools or universities must take some proactive steps to encourage their overseas program partners and organizations to provide physical and program modifications, auxiliary aids, and other accommodations.
- Mandating medical disclosure should not be for the sake of disclosure, but to assist the applicant to make a thorough and fair self-evaluation of whether she has, or can acquire, the qualities that the university or exchange program considers necessary for a successful overseas experience in a particular country.
- A U.S. university or school on American soil that is being asked to place a student with a disability cannot use the fact that the foreign student is not yet on American soil to somehow immunize itself against being subject to federal law.
Find the two documents linked off the webpage for MIUSA's 2005 publication of Rights and Responsibilities: A
Guide to National and International Disability Related Laws for
International Exchange Organizations and Participants.
