The Cooperativa Altavoz together with FEAPS and Barclays Foundation launched an initiative on accessibility of bank services in Spain. A group of persons with intellectual disabilities visited a bank office in Madrid to scrutinise its accessibility and propose actions to improve the access of people with intellectual disabilities to its services.
The European Union (EU) is preparing to implement the next 7 years of the Structural and Investment Funding. The framework put in place for this new programming period represents a historic opportunity to protect the rights of Europe’s most excluded people – those living in institutional care.
Increasing competencies of civil society organisations to advocate and monitor the rights of people with psycho-social and intellectual disabilities in Balkan countries is the aim of the project PERSON (Partnership to Ensure Reforms of Supports in other Nations).
On 15 January, the European Parliament adopted the revised Public Procurement Directive which recognises the specificity of social, health and other services provided directly to individuals. The renewed legislation encourages member states to consider quality, not only price, when awarding contracts for social services.
Allowing people with intellectual disabilities to become teachers at institutions of higher education is an overall aim of a three-year project in Kiel in Germany. The project“Inclusive Education” will firstly train people with disabilities to gain the necessary qualifications in teaching and consequently, support these trainees to give classes at the institutions of higher education about disability and inclusion.
The Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on a Communications Procedure will enter into force on 14 April 2014, three months after its ratification by 10th country - Costa Rica. The Protocol will enable children to bring their complaints of human rights violations before the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.
