This month, besides preparing for upcoming key internal meetings – the EBU annual Advocacy Committee meeting of Warsaw (26-27 October) and the Board meeting of Madrid (5-6 October) where advocacy will feature as an important item for discussion – we continued to be busy monitoring post-European elections institutional developments at EU level.
The composition of the proposed new European Commission was also followed closely. The Belgian former Minister of Justice Ms Hadja Habib is designated to have responsibility for “Preparedness, Crisis Management, and Equality”. Her mission letter ambitiously includes “Full implementation of the Disability Strategy and CRPD”. However, we are disappointed at the downgrade of the Equality portfolio. We echoed the EDF press release in which they called on the European Parliament to press for maintaining a stand-alone Equality portfolio. Concretely, they can do this through the public hearings of commissioners-designate (week of 4 November), written questions ahead of that (end of October) and eventually the plenary vote to approve the Commission as a whole.
We identified new key actors at the European Parliament, including group coordinators in the most relevant committees, and informed our members about these. EDF signals 38 elected MEPs that have signed their pledge for disability rights (our of 200 candidates), and 29 re-elected MEPs that were members of the Disability Intergroup in the previous assembly. Only 2 MEPs have (visible) disabilities: Katrin Langensiepen (Greens, Germany) and Pál Szekeres (Patriots for Europe, Hungary).
We obtained from the new Chairwoman of the Parliament’s Employment and Social Affairs committee, the Finnish MEP Li Andersson, an agreement of principle to sponsor an EBU event at the European Parliament in Brussels. We still need to find a suitable date for this, as our contemplated target of 12 November would be problematic for MEP Andersson’s office.
Thanks to the participation of our members – namely in Austria, the Czech Republic and France – we obtained some good results on our lobbying to obtain vocal support among MEPs for the re-establishment of the Disability Intergroup and expressions of interest to participate in it eventually. This action request is on-going and we invite our members to participate in it, if they have not done so already, and to keep us informed of results.
Other advocacy actions this month include:
In the framework of the EU Disability Platform, we contributed comments:
- to the European Commission's draft Guidance on independent living and inclusion in the community of persons with disabilities, and
- to the final text for the study on alternative employment models.
In relation to European standardisation:
- Bart Simmons represents EBU in the accessibility working group of ANEC and, as such, represents ANEC in CEN TC 293 (the plenary and also the Working Groups 12 on accessibility and 13 on tactile lettering). This is strategical given that the focus is on visually impaired people. We have asked tour members in the EU to contact their national standards body on this file, and have received positive feedback from the Czech republic, Denmark and Lithuania.
- Looking at the larger picture, ANEC submitted its comments in answer to the EC public consultation on the evaluation of the Standardisation Regulation(EU) 1025/2012, a message we contributed to with EDF and fully support.
We invited comments/input from our members to an EDF draft Position paper on Assistance Dogs in Air Travel. Hungary reacted quite extensively and France also responded.
On behalf of EBU, based on their experience gained through your Wayfinding Centre, Vision Ireland responded to a PWC Survey on Designing Safe Road Infrastructure, for the European Commission (DG MOVE, Road Safety Unit), including a focus on vulnerable road users.
The Commission’s Joint Research Centre requested to meet with EDF and us in October to discuss Waste Sorting Labels. We solicited input from our members in that perspective.
We attended the joint EDF-IAAP conference of 24 September, “Celebrating the Web Accessibility Directive Fourth Anniversary”.
On 26 September, together with other European level disability organisations, we met around IDA and EDF to discuss the next steps in the CRPD review of EU. It is now confirmed that the EU will be reviewed by the CRPD Committee at its next session in March 2025.
Interesting news from the Daisy Consortium’s EU Inclusive Publishing Forum of 17 September, to support our position regarding ‘backlist’ e-books after 28 June 2025 (deadline for compliance with the European Accessibility Act): in the American Disability Act (which is aligned with the EAA on e-books) the question about backlist is addressed and says that any title would be covered as long as it is still being sold.
Also worth noting, is the study published by EDF on the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on persons with disabilities. It supports our demand, in the European countries concerned, that disability benefits be not conditioned by not being engaged in full time employment (the so-called “benefits trap”) and that, generally speaking, the benefits take into consideration that persons with disabilities face extra-costs of living regardless of other revenue they may have.