Marrakesh Treaty
Iceland ratified the Treaty in December, the last of EU/European Economic Area countries.
We have solicited updates from our members in the EU about national implementing legislation and how the cross-border exchange of works is proceeding.
Reform of EU electoral law
The vote on amendments at the European Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs committee is now likely to take place in January.
European Accessibility Act
We called our members in the EU to engage with their national standardisation bodies, whether directly or through their national disability fora, to inform them about and express support for the ANEC/EDF position regarding the European Commission’s request to European standardisation organisation (ESOs) to elaborate or revise determined accessibility standards. This action request is in the perspective of the meeting of ESOs in January to discuss the final draft request.
We asked to highlight the following more important messages:
• We support the final draft of the European Commission’s EAA standardisation request, which well reflects the recommendations of DPOs, especially to ensure inclusiveness of the standardisation work for persons with disabilities and their representative organisations by European standardisation organisations.
• While we deplore the dropping of the request that standards harmonised for the Accessibility Act are free of charge for non-profit organisations, we welcome that the draft request explicitly calls on ESOs to ensure accessibility of the work processes, meetings venues and documents, and that reasonable accommodation is provided when requested. These elements should be kept in the final request.
On 1st December, our Advocacy and Campaigning Officer participated as speaker in a Daisy Consortium webinar on the implementation of the EAA as far as the publishing industry is concerned.
European Disability Platform
On 15 December the new EU Disability Platform held its first meeting, in which we were represented by our President. The Commission presented the structural elements of the annual Work Programme 2022, which were approved. It invited represented DPOs:
- to suggest topics of particular importance for their work,
- to signal thematic events (maximum 2) on horizontal topics in line with the UNCRPD, and
- to collectively send (though EDF) up to 6 priority topics to be placed on the agenda of one of the three plenary meetings to be held in 2022.
The next meeting will take place on 18 February.
Review of the EU by the UN CRPD Committee
We contributed comment to the EDF draft alternative report. The deadline to submit written alternative reports is 14 February 2022. An EDF coordination meeting is set for 18 January.
Statistics on disability
We obtained the contribution, for our thematic quarterly newsletter Focus, of an article by a representative of the Eurostat unit at the European Commission, on the importance of statistical data to better measure the needs and trends in Europe, specially as regards the inclusion of persons with disabilities in the job market. The article appears supportive of our demands.
In parallel, EBU delivered a response to the European Commission public consultation on redeveloping European statistics on population.
Events
The European Day of Persons with Disabilities event 2021 took place on 2-3 December. This year’s edition focused on the following three topics: access to healthcare, digital transformation, and the experiences and needs of children with disabilities. We used the opportunity of this Day to communicate via Twitter on the relevant output of the PARVIS project.
The conference was concluded, as usual, by the annual Access City Award Ceremony, rewarding cities who are making continuous efforts to become more accessible for persons with disabilities and older people, the which visibility we contributed to on Twitter. Six cities were distinguished: Barcelona (Spain), Helsinki (Finland), Leuven (Belgium), Luxembourg City (Luxembourg), Palma (Spain) and Porto (Portugal). The general award 2022 went to Luxembourg.
On 8 December, we attended an EDF/ECR Group of the European Parliament webinar on making digital services and platforms accessible.
On 14 December, EBU organised an internal online gathering to share key highlights of the year and look together to 2022. A prominent place was given in the exchange to the results of advocacy and campaigning in the past year.
Around the kick-off meeting of the Disability Platform (see above) the incoming French Presidency of the EU announced a ministerial conference on “Improving accessibility and the access to rights, implementing the European Strategy 2021-2030”, in Paris on 9 March 2022.