Ms. Lottidou, in her intervention, as the Independent Mechanism for the Promotion, Protection and Monitoring of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, said that the World Day of Persons with Disabilities was established in 1992 by a resolution of the UN General Assembly and is celebrated every year on 3 December, commemorating the adoption by the international organization, on 3 December 1982, of the Programme of Action for Persons with Disabilities.
The latter, he adds, led to the signing of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on 30 March 2007, which was ratified by the Republic of Cyprus in 2011, "and is a milestone in the historic journey for the recognition, promotion and protection of the rights of persons with disabilities".
The Convention, he notes, "finally eliminates the medical approach to disability and establishes a rights-based approach, recognising that disability is an integral part of human diversity and that addressing it is not a matter of a charitable approach but an issue at the core of human rights".
The Commissioner states that, the provisions of the Convention, the General Comments of the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in relation to the interpretation of specific articles of the Convention, as well as the Concluding Observations of the Committee regarding the First Report of Cyprus published in 2017, constitute the main tools of the Office when investigating complaints submitted regarding the rights of persons with disabilities, as well as in the context of our ex officio interventions on issues concerning persons with disabilities.
She states that the majority of the issues brought to the attention of her office for investigation relate to ensuring an adequate standard of living for persons with disabilities, the definition and assessment of disability for the purposes of access to social benefits, their equal and non-discriminatory access to education and issues of accessibility to the physical and built environment and information.
"Indicatively, this year, as in previous years, a large number of our interventions have addressed the unqualified right of children with disabilities to equal and non-discriminatory or inclusive access to education and the educational process, on the basis of what is detailed in Article 24 of the Convention and the Committee's General Comments on the subject," it adds.
The Commissioner referred to compliance by the Ministry of Education with interventions by her office.
In particular, she referred to her March 2022 report regarding disability discrimination due to the refusal to provide reasonable accommodations to a student with a disability during the National Access Examinations.
The relevant Ministry complied with its binding recommendation and during the Pancyprian Access Examinations provided this student with a differentiated examination essay based on his assessed and individualised educational needs, it said.
On another occasion, in her office's September 2022 Self-Regulatory Placement regarding the provision of chaperones to children with disabilities attending schools, "we reiterated the need to review the process of hiring school chaperones, based primarily on the best interests of the child, as well as that chaperones, as a form of reasonable accommodation provided to children with disabilities, should be able to adequately meet the individualized needs of each child as determined by the Provincial Special Education and Training Committees."
While in a November 2022 report, regarding the failure to provide a student with a disability with an attendant to meet his or her individualized needs, "we noted that each case of a student with a disability requiring reasonable accommodations and, in particular, a school attendant, should be considered and addressed on a separate and individualized basis and in light of the unique needs that the requested reasonable accommodations should meet."
Where a student who is unable to self-support and experiences multiple disabilities is not provided with a school chaperone who is able to meet his or her needs, but is given a reasonable accommodation on the same basis as the criteria considered in providing a chaperone to another child with a disability or learning developmental disability who apparently has fewer needs, "there is a blatant violation of the principle of equality and discrimination against the child because of the similar treatment of dissimilar cases which is expressly prohibited by Article 28 of the Constitution," it said.
The Commissioner notes that, recently "we were pleased to learn", the competent Ministry has initiated the implementation of her recommendation and is already taking steps to recruit an escort capable of meeting the multiple disabilities of the pupil concerned by this report.
Invariably, it is noted, the promotion of independent living, recognition of legal capacity, accessibility, inclusive/inclusive education, equal opportunities in the labour market and non-discriminatory participation in all aspects of society, economic and cultural life, should now be seen as self-evident and indispensable for removing the exclusions that people with disabilities inevitably experience and for ending their marginalisation.
In conclusion, the Commissioner said that, taking into account that, according to UN figures, 15%, i.e. 1/7 of the world's population are people with disabilities, "it becomes clear" that our goal as a society is to remove all barriers without exception, so that more than one billion of our fellow human beings are not deprived of equal integration into society but are able to enjoy their rights without discrimination.
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