INFORMATION BULLETIN
MDAC Applauds European MPs and Urges Governmental Action
26 January 2009
Today marked the opening of the first session this year of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), and among its first actions was the adoption of a resolution and recommendation ensuring the access to rights for people with disabilities and their full and active participation in all areas of life. These documents recommend to Member States to include disability issues in every area of policy-making and to ensure that disability-related programmes are sufficiently resourced. Crucially, PACE demands an end to policies that directly or indirectly segregate people with physical or mental disabilities.
The adoption of today's documents (which are not yet online) follows a report prepared by Bernard Marquet, Member of Parliament from Monaco, acting as Rapporteur for the PACE Committee on Social, Health and Family Affairs. MDAC assisted Mr Marquet in developing his report, which included human rights issues of pressing urgency for MDAC - the right to legal capacity and the right to live in the community - areas, the Marquet report said, "where action is of utmost importance [leading] directly to increased quality of life for people with disabilities."
The Parliamentary Assembly emphasised the need for all 47 of the Member States of the Council of Europe to ratify and implement the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the paradigm shift which it promotes. In particular, the Parliamentary Assembly recommended to governments that they take specific actions to:
ˇ ensure exercise of legal capacity on an equal basis with others by providing for alternatives to guardianship such as supported decision-making;
ˇ guarantee that persons under guardianship are not deprived of their fundamental rights (not least the rights to own property, to work, to a family life, to marry, to vote, to form and join associations, to bring legal proceedings and to draw up a will);
ˇ provide safeguards against abuse of persons under guardianship including establishing mechanisms for periodic review of guardians' actions and ensuring that legislation mandates compulsory, regular and meaningful reviews of guardianship in which the person concerned is fully involved and adequately legally represented;
ˇ commit themselves to the process of deinstitutionalisation by re-organising services and re-allocating resources from institutions to community-based services;
ˇ provide adequate and sustained financial assistance to families to enable them to support their relatives with disabilities in the family home;
ˇ develop effective, independent inspectorates to monitor existing institutions;
MDAC congratulates PACE on the adoption of these instruments and will be writing to the heads of government of each Member State of the Council of Europe asking what steps the Government will take to implement these recommendations from Europe's highest parliamentary body. In its advocacy MDAC will echo the PACE report by underlining the need for each of the actions to be discussed and implemented with the active involvement of people with disabilities. In this way the principle of full participation is put directly into practice contributing to the creation of truly inclusive societies.
What is the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe?
The Parliamentary Assembly groups 636 members (318 representatives and 318 substitutes) from the 47 national parliaments of Member States of the Council of Europe. Founded in 1949, the Council of Europe seeks to develop throughout Europe common and democratic principles with a particular emphasis on legal standards, human rights, democratic development, the rule of law and cultural cooperation. It has 47 Member States with some 800 million citizens.
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