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Introduction: Legal protection of the rights of people with disability in Iran has been considered by the governmental and non-governmental sectors over the past two decades. In this study, we have examined the medical, social, and ethical approaches of disability in the Law enacted in 1396, on the protection of the rights of persons with disabilities. We have also tried to recognize discourses involved in the law.
Method: Using Norman Fairclough's method of critical discourse analysis, the text of the law and the interviews of the people involved in its compilation have been analyzed in three levels of description, interpretation, and explanation. First, we have provided conceptual categories of Faircloughian method in a table; second, we have extracted the words and phrases related to these categories from the text of the law and interviews to another table. The second table shows the relations between three levels of critical analysis: grammatical and semantic sections, textual or discourse vision, and ideological or structural frames in this research.
Findings: Our analysis of law and interviews concentrates on three kinds of data: rhetorical, discursive, and structural/ideological data. This study shows the Presence/absence and competition of governmental, legislative, private, and social discourses and their unequal role in lawmaking. In fact, governmental discourse has played a completely dominant role. Academic discourse has been absent in the process, and private discourse has had a hidden but active role.
Discussion: Changing the purpose of law-making from social to supportive is a result of predominant role of governmental discourse. This leads to an order of discourse based on inequality and low participation of social discourses. This leaves most of the social issues of disability unspoken, ambiguous, and without legal support. The predominant medical model of disability, through a reproduction of its concepts and definitions of disability, causes the continuation and intensification of disability and inequality for disabled persons.

Keywords: Critical Analysis, The Rights of People with Disability, Law, Discourse. Disability

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