The last two months were largely marked by activities of a horizontal character:
On 5 July, we participated in a civil society organisations meeting with Mr Mario Nava, the new Director-General of the European Commission’s DG Employment and Social Affairs. In follow-up, we sent him the EBU Statement on European Elections 2024.
On invitation from the European Disability Forum, we endorsed a civil society organisations joint statement “Paving the Way for an Equality-centred Policy Cycle”.
We informed our members in the EU of the new composition of the European Parliament and pointed at some key MEPs in the most directly relevant committees.
We issued a heads-up for an MEP lobbying action request for the re-establishment of the European Parliament’s Disability Intergroup.
We defined and communicated the EBU delegation at the European Day of Persons with Disabilities event at the end of November.
On an invitation from the Council of Europe to bring our observations to the possibility of withdrawing EBU CSO participatory status due to a low level of engagement with them, we wrote to their Civil Society Unit to clarify that we did want to retain that status and, on the contrary, meet with them to explore the possibility to develop our cooperation.
We continued to prepare the meeting of the EBU Advocacy Committee (ex-Commission for Liaising with the EU, with a revised scope) 26-27 October in Warsaw – a draft agenda was circulated to the members. There will also be a representative of the Polish Government, in the perspective of the Polish Presidency of the EU in the first semester of 2025. A representative from the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights at this meeting will also participate, to explore possible cooperation.
We also pursued our efforts to organise a post-European elections event of 12 November at the European Parliament in Brussels (to be confirmed) for which we solicited the sponsorship of Ms Li Andersson, the Finnish MEP that chairs the Parliament’s Employment and Social Affairs Committee.
Thematic-wise, we were busy on the following issues:
- We attended the AccessibleEU European event of 2 July, “Smart Cities: Enhancing Urban Design and Mobility for All”.
- We were interviewed by the UK’s Royal Society for their report on digital assistive technologies.
- On 9 July, we met with Worldline, the organisation representing the payment terminals industry at EU level, to engage a dialogue with them around our recommendations for accessible payment terminals.
- On 17 August, we asked our members in the EU to lobby their national standardisation bodies for support to continue the work on a European standard on Braille and raised characters (tactile lettering) in the built environment.
- We were invited and agreed to speak at a European Commission’s Joint Research Centre’s workshop of 7 October on automated vehicles. We will be represented by Erwin Denninghaus, from our German member DBSV.
- We were also invited (and agreed to speak) on 24 October at the Irish National Disability Authority’s annual conference, on “Promoting the participation of disabled people in cultural life, recreation leisure and sport in Ireland – UNCRPD Article 30”.
As far as consultations are concerned:
- We responded to the European Commission’s public consultation for the mid-term review of the Creative Europe programme 2021-2027, in which we focused again on the MEDIA strand and the failure to use the leverage of funding to promote audio description and audio subtitling.
- We contributed comments to the European Disability Forum for their response to the public consultation to evaluate the European Standardisation system.
- We were solicited by the consultancy PWC to take a survey for the European Commission on “Designing Safe Road Infrastructure”. We have asked our Irish member Vision Ireland to take this survey (to be confirmed), building on the experience gained through your Wayfinding Center.
- We contributed comments to the European Commission on their final draft note “Guidance on independent living and inclusion in the community of persons with disabilities”, an element of the EU Disability Rights Strategy.
News on employment: at the EU EPSCO Council meeting of 16 July, the Hungarian Presidency engaged Member States in a policy debate on inclusion of persons with disabilities in the labour market, and to indicate what they consider the most important measures and policy tools to promote quality and equal employment of persons with disabilities in the open labour market, and whether they have set a national target for increasing the employment rate of persons with disabilities. For a report on the outcome, see the Presidency’s report and the Council’s website. The Hungarian Presidency also announced two Council Conclusions on disability rights, respectively on promoting the social participation and inclusion of persons with disabilities, and on strengthening access to quality services, and an event on employment of persons with disabilities on 9 October in Budapest.