One Million Signatures in campaign for comprehensive EU disability legislation
In only 9 months of time, the European Disability Forum has met the ambitious challenge launched last January: to collect one million signatures across the European Union in favour of comprehensive EU disability legislation. The President of the European Disability Forum, Yannis Vardakastanis, announced this achievement to the 118 member organisations which were actively involved in the “1million4disability” campaign. “This is a landmark success for our movement”, said Vardakastanis, “but most important, this is a strong signal coming from a million Europeans to the European Union leaders, that can hardly be ignored”. The campaign petition, officially launched by the European Disability Forum, called on the European Union for the adoption of comprehensive disability legislation that will effectively protect disabled people from discrimination in all fields of life. Based of the principle of participatory democracy, the petition also aimed to raise awareness among public opinion on the difficult situation faced by 50 million disabled people in the EU, confronted to discrimination and exclusion in all fields of life.
Yannis Vardakastanis, EDF President: “At present, legislative measures towards disabled people are limited, despite the existing legal basis in the EU Treaty. Today we can say that we do have the support of one million European citizens. We are confident that public opinion will continue backing this proposal and that decision-makers will listen to the voices of their electorate”.
