This disability rights timeline lists events outside the United States relating to the civil rights of people with disabilities, including court decisions, the passage of legislation, activists' actions, significant abuses of people with disabilities, and the founding of various organizations. Although the disability rights movement itself began in the 1960s, advocacy for the rights of people with disabilities started much earlier and continues to the present.
Prior to the 1700s
Ancient Greece – A pharmakós (, plural pharmakoi) in ancient Greek religion was the ritualistic sacrifice or exile of a human scapegoat or victim. A physically disabled person, a slave or a criminal was chosen and expelled from the community at times of disaster (famine, invasion or plague) or at times of calendrical crisis. It was believed that this would bring about purification. On the first day of the Thargelia, a festival of Apollo at Athens, two men, the Pharmakoi, were led out as if to be sacrificed as an expiation. Some scholia state that pharmakoi were actually sacrificed (thrown from a cliff or burned), but many modern scholars reject this, arguing that the earliest source for the pharmakos (the iambic satirist Hipponax) shows the pharmakoi being beaten and stoned, but not executed. A more plausible explanation would be that sometimes they were executed and sometimes not, depending on the attitude of the victim. For instance, a deliberate unrepentant murderer would most likely be put to death. 1200s – In the 13th century, England declared people with intellectual disabilities to be incapable of making decisions or managing their affairs. 1324 – The idea of insanity in English law dates from 1324, when the Statute de Praerogativa Regis allowed the King to take the lands of "idiots and lunatics."
1700s
1714 – In English law, the Vagrancy Act 1714 allowed two Justices of the Peace to confine a dangerous lunatic. 1729 – In 1729 punishment was recommended for people with physical disabilities, whether they were born with disabilities or acquired them later in life, who appeared in public. These concepts were covered by what were colloquially known as unsightly beggar ordinances. 1774 – The Madhouses Act 1774 (14 Geo. 3 c.49) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain, which set out a legal framework for regulating "madhouses" (insane asylums). It was repealed by the Madhouses Act 1828.
