Events:
We attended the following events:
- EU Social Forum 2025 - Skills for a Competitive Europe
- ECE Civil Society Seminar 2025 on priorities for the European Semester 2025: toward a resilient and inclusive Europe. We were active in the working-group on “Tackling poverty and promoting social and labour market inclusion for persons with disabilities”. In that context, we raised the “disability benefits trap” issue again.
- European Parliament/European Economic and Social Committee Civil Society Week conference, session "Spotlight on the MFF", about the next EU 7-year budget.
- Plenary Meeting of the Disability Platform, followed by the Polish Presidency of the EU conference on disability. More on this in the text edition of this newsletter.
A draft agenda is being prepared, together with Fundaciόn ONCE, for the AccessibleEU conference of July 1st, on “How to Improve Accessibility of Banking Services”, where we aim to raise the visibility of our recommendations for accessible payment terminals.
Campaigning:
Our suggested written parliamentary question on the accessibility of household appliances, for written answer by the European Commission, was effectively submitted by Finnish MEP Ohisalo, and published. We look forward to seeing the Commission’s answer.
Meanwhile, the concept note for our future campaign on the matter was sent to our Advocacy Committee for comments. We have started to collect reactions, before approval of a final note by our Board.
Advocacy (miscellaneous):
We had a bilateral meeting with German MEP Katrin Langensiepen, Vice-Chair of the Employment and Social Affairs committee and co-Chair of the Disability Intergroup of the European Parliament, about the European Commission’s decision to withdraw the proposal for an Equal Treatment Directive.
We invited our member organisations in the EU/EEA to lobby their governments for an ambitious national implementation of the Disability Card/European Parking Card for persons with disabilities Directive. We are also monitoring the state of play of EU-Switzerland negotiations about this. We provided feedback to EDF on their draft Toolkit for national implementation of the directive.
Despite extensive briefing in previous dialogue with civil society organisations (including EBU), the questions eventually asked by the UN CRPD Committee in their review of the EU turned out to be too superficial on our key issues to produce meaningful replies from the EU, especially about the implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty. Hopefully the follow-up recommendations of the committee will nevertheless be useful for future advocacy.
We continued our desk research toward a report on the “Disability Benefits Trap” issue, in relation to access to employment. We send a questionnaire about it to our members, to fine-tune the analysis.
We were solicited by the European Emergency Number Association to participate in a joint letter on accessibility of emergency numbers, and agreed to do so.
We circulated to our Mobility Working Group an EDF survey about the experience by persons with disabilities of the EU Rail Traveller Rights Regulation. We also contributed, through our members, to the EDF position paper on assistance dogs in air travel.
Consultations:
We responded to the public consultation by the European Commission on its Multiannual Financial Framework – i.e., next 7-year budget.
Following up on our meeting with the Commission’s DG CNECT, and after liaising with EDF, we provided some significant examples of gaps left by the Web Accessibility Directive and the European Accessibility Act, in covering digital services, that the Digital Services Act-related code of conduct could address.