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Based on research in Belgian and French diplomatic archives, official UN documents, and ILO archives, this article aims to explain the genesis of the Declaration of the Rights of Disabled Persons, adopted by the UN in 1975 in the middle of the Cold War. We reconstruct the interactions between the actors involved in its conception and show how the Belgian delegation at the UN showed great diplomatic skill in getting the Declaration adopted in a single session of the General Assembly. They managed to avoid potential obstruction from socialist countries and convinced other delegations of the legitimacy of an exceptional procedure, which had the effect of excluding NGOs from the discussion process. The Declaration reinforces the dynamics of normalization and legitimizes a series of rights, notably political rights, but restricts and obscures other rights (accessibility, etc.).