On Friday, 10 September, the Ministry of Family and Social Policy officially inaugurated the implementation of a new project under the Operational Programme Knowledge Education Development. Its full name is „Development of a draft act implementing the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities with the proposed name: Act on equalising opportunities for persons with disabilities along with a Regulatory Impact Assessment and justification, as well as proposals for legislative amendments following the new act”.

What is it all about in practice?

The objective of the project is to develop an act on equalising opportunities for persons with disabilities. This, in turn, is to allow for the full implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The agreement is the beginning of a very important stage. Poland ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as early as in 2012. Now, after almost 10 years, we are starting to implement this convention in practice by creating a draft act – as the Deputy Minister of Family and Government Plenipotentiary for Persons with Disabilities, Paweł Wdówik, said on Friday.

As he stressed, the act was to change not only the situation of persons with disabilities in Poland, but the whole system of perceiving this group of citizens, as well as the place of those citizens in the country.

I have this unique opportunity to switch from being a deputy minister to being a person with a disability and from this perspective I can say that this is a great hope and opportunity we have to create statutory provisions comparable to the best ones. Those which put strong emphasis on civil rights, human rights, and everything which follows is a consequence of this approach. It is extremely important to me that in this project we managed to gather very strong representatives of the communities of persons with disabilities, i.e. organisations with a large reach, having a recognisable brand and being highly reputable. On the other hand, we have a completely incredible research and analytical team composed of scientists from the best Polish universities – pointed out Deputy Minister Wdówik.

The floor was also taken by the representatives of the Project Partners.

The project will be implemented in Partnership with:

Polish Disability Forum,

Foundation Institute for Regional Development (based in Kraków),

University of Warsaw,

SGH Warsaw School of Economics,

Scientific Foundation Institute for Structural Research.

The Project Leader is the Office of the Government Plenipotentiary for Persons with Disabilities at the Ministry of Family and Social Policy.

The project provides for analysing the actual situation of persons with disabilities – reviewing and analysing all legal solutions in the field of support for persons with disabilities, as well as broad public consultations, taking into account all stakeholders. These are, inter alia, persons with disabilities and their environment, non-governmental organisations, social partners and representatives of local government units.

It is assumed that the project will be implemented from September 2021 to October 2023.

Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 13 December 2006. Poland ratified it in September 2012.

The Act on equalising opportunities for persons with disabilities will contain regulations related to disability, which are not included in other legal acts. The objective of the new act will be to provide support mechanisms consistent with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and to „operationalise” its provisions, with reference to the definitions contained in the Convention.