It seems like yesterday when, in 1996, we participated in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, ratified by Spain in 2008, and where the main Sustainable Development Goals after the approval of the 2030 Agenda, marked a very clear guideline, that of inclusion and equality of people with disabilities.
More than a billion people in the world, almost four million in Spain, and more than one hundred thousand in the Canary Islands, are the figures of people with some type of disability, whether physical or organic, intellectual, sensory, visual or mental, where we cannot ignore all the families as well.
On a new December 3rd, European and International Day of Persons with Disabilities, the disability sector continues to emphasize daily work in different areas of normalized and inclusive life, always from equality, such as non-discrimination and equal opportunities, universal accessibility, design for all and the elimination of barriers of all kinds, employment, education, fiscal policies, health, health care and consumer protection with disabilities, women with disabilities and gender violence.
We are clear that the work continues to advance in the way of addressing disability through the promotion of concepts as basic as personal autonomy and freedom. In fact, the new General Law on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and their Social Inclusion contemplates the express recognition of the freedom of persons with disabilities in decision-making and the guarantee of their rights as citizens, taking into account all definitions of discrimination and including for the first time discrimination by association and harassment.
One of the parameters of the welfare state in Spain is based on the presence of opportunities for all, mainly so that all those people in a situation of some disability, freely develop their abilities. The current Action Plan 2014-2016 on the Disability Strategy, recently approved by the Government of Spain, contemplates almost one hundred measures that advance equality, education, employment, accessibility and the dynamization of the economy. To that should be added, in terms of Employment, the Entrepreneurship and Youth Employment Strategy, which deepens individual autonomy, equality and independent living.
The CERMI Manifesto, the Committee of Representatives of Persons with Disabilities in Spain, calls us to an urgent debate of all administrations (state and territorial), political forces, social agents, etc. to reconfigure the Law of Personal Autonomy and Attention to Dependency, a social protection mechanism that is still far from reaching the required potential. Because, as CERMI continues to remind us, the abandonment of passive conceptions of attention to dependency must be reformulated, with scarce, outdated and rigid benefits and without free choice, to orient it to the real promotion of personal autonomy, independent living and inclusion in the community, with the generalization of deinstitutionalization and benefits such as personal assistance, which is barely extended today.
I conclude with the CERMI's call for a great State pact that redefines and merges a care model inserted within Social Security, in order to guarantee equality and equality between the different autonomous communities and, as always, with sufficient assured funding, without co-payments, for its correct and rapid deployment, immediately attending to all people so that the different recognized benefits reach everyone. Allow me to end this reflection with the slogan of the Spanish Confederation of People with Physical and Organic Disabilities -COCEMFE-, where it reminds us that "for every thing that differentiates us, there are a thousand others that unite us".
Antonio Hernández Lobo is a member of the Canary Confederation of Associations of People with Physical and Organic Disabilities
