Accessibility
Books - Marrakesh Treaty
We sent to our members in the EU a request for feedback on the results of the Marrakesh Treaty so far and in particular, where applicable, on the impact of a compensation scheme for author rights holders and of an obligation to be registered on a list of authorised entities.
Accessible e-books – Implementation of Accessibility Act
The kick-off meeting of the task group for accessible payment terminals and other self-service terminals is set for 1st June.
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We attended, on 18 May, the first meeting of the EU Disability Platform’s subgroup on the future AccessibleEU resource centre. This subgroup will inform the creation of AccessibleEU and accompany its first years of functioning. Members of the sub-group have been asked for feedback on the structure and the activities of AccessibleEU, in view of the drafting of a contract to the Commission – which is what this is about; AccessibleEU will have no formal legal role.
Equality
We attended, on 18 May, the first meeting of the EU Disability Platform’s subgroup on the Employment Package. The Commission presented the 6 agreed areas of the Package, within which members of the sub-group are called to comment and eventually to propose their participation:
- Strengthening the capacities of employment and integration services
- Affirmative action and combatting stereotypes to promote hiring perspectives
- Ensuring reasonable accommodation at work. On this, it was recalled the Equality in Employment Directive will not be reviewed, but rather guidance developed, exchange of best practices fostered for good implementation
- Securing health and safety at work to prevent disabilities
- Securing vocational rehabilitation schemes in case of chronic diseases or accidents
- Exploring quality jobs in sheltered employment, pathways to the open employment market
We used the opportunity of this meeting to welcome the inclusion of the Disability Employment Gap statistics within the data set for the Social Scoreboard, as a first important result of the EU Disability Rights Strategy.
Political participation
On 16 May we attended the European Disability Forum event around the publication of EDF’s 6th Human Rights Report (see more on this below), focusing on political participation. This report integrates input from EBU based on the output of our Accessible Voting Awareness-raising project.
We have identified and started to liaise with the Commission units that will work on the future guide of good electoral practice and we learned that it is planned for quarter 3 of 2023.
Social security and welfare
We attended, on 18 May, the first meeting of the EU Disability Platform’s subgroup on the future EU Disability Card. The discussion revolved around the type of initiative (a legal act?), whether it will cover also the Disability Parking Card, the scope of the services covered, and how to facilitate free movement in Europe and the recognition of the disability status without overstepping national competence in this area.
We have started to investigate available data on disability benefits across the EU, with a view to contributing to the announced study on social protection and services for persons with disabilities, announced in the EU Disability Rights Strategy for 2023.
Mobility
We are looking into the opportunity of the European Mobility Week 16-22 September to showcase our PAsCAL project on connected automated vehicles.
On 4 May we delivered and published a response to the European Commission’s consultation on the safety of automated vehicles (revision of the implementing regulation), based on feedback from our Road Safety and Accessibility of Transport group.
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On 18 May we provided input, at the request of the rapporteur, to the European Parliament’s Petitions Committee, for their opinion on the European Parliament’s report "Towards equal rights for persons with disabilities".
On 24 May we attended the presentation by Eurostat – the EU’s statistical body – of its 6th annual report on the monitoring of progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Besides the horizontal chapter on the impact of COVID19, disability is mentioned about SDGs 1 (Poverty), 2 (Education) and 8 (Employment). Regarding SDG 10 (Equality), there is still not one single mention of disability in the report, other than to describe the goal – which we have publicly questioned Eurostat about at the meeting. Their reply acknowledges a gap: “This is an issue that is being discussed. We know there is interest for this issue. The difficulty is how to find comparable statistics across the EU. A data gap, we can say, which makes it hard to use disability as an indicator for the monitoring report.” For the record…
On 25 May we attended the European Economic and Social Committee public hearing "Improving Equality in the EU", namely to hear what is being said about the proposed horizontal Equal Treatment Directive, blocked at the EU Council for many years now. More on this in the next edition of this Newsletter.