Office for the rights of persons with disabilities invites to public discussions

Educational human rights defense organization “Office for the rights of persons with disabilities” starts the new stage of informational campaign “Accessibility”. Events are scheduled for 24 months.

The whole program is aimed at the formation of state program on implementation of the Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities in the Republic of Belarus 2016-2021. The aim of this stage of the campaign is to influence the content and format of state programs for persons with disabilities in order to focus them on the norms of the Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities.

Siarhei Drazdouski, the coordinator of the Office for the rights of persons with disabilities, comments on the situation: “State programs are the major tools of state’s policy of solving the disability issues. Qualitative planning of these programs and the participation of the society play a significant role in successful solving of disability issues. That is why it is written in the legislation that the process of the formation of new programs for disabled has to include the discussion with public associations of disabled, as the representatives of interests of persons with disabilities and civil society.

The next year is the year of summing up the preliminary results of the realization of the existing programs and preparing the future ones. We consider that the claimed by the government of the Republic of Belarus intentions to join the Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities are very important and they are a decisive factor during the planning of the future programs. That is why the Office for the rights of persons with disabilities suggests holding discussion of the forthcoming process of the planning of state programs which will be aimed at solving disability issues in which all the interested and active participant will take part.

We remind, that today in Belarus there are two ongoing state programs for persons with disabilities: complex program of social service development for 2011-2015 and its subprogram “Disability prevention and the rehabilitation of disabled persons” and State program on creation of barrier-free environment for physically weak persons for 2011-2015. Today we have to think about the preparation for the formation of programs for the next 5 years. Educational human rights defense organization “The Office for the rights of persons with disabilities” starts working on making the campaign aimed at the formation of State program for 2016-20211 more open and public. We are planning to discuss the project with the participation of NGOs and experts. Public discussions of the future format and the content of programs in regions and the formation of regional agenda concerning programs will be the first initiative in this direction. The Office for the rights of persons with disabilities is planning to organize events in the format of open discussion/round table in every region of the country and in Minsk.

The events will be open to general public with individual invitations for NGOs’ representatives, local authorities, activists of disability movement, mass-media. We invite all who are interested to take part in the events. The plan of the events is being created and will be presented at the website of the Office for the rights of persons with disabilities www.disright.org.