Joint NGO letter: present the European Accessibility Act & unblock the Equal Treatment Directive
Joint NGO letter, including Social Platform, sent to the European Parliament’s political groups on June 18, 2015:
‘We, the Equality for All Alliance, have decided to come together to collectively push for the adoption of the Horizontal Equal Treatment Directive which was published by the European Commission seven years ago. The European Parliament has adopted a favourable position on the initiative and since then repeatedly called upon the Commission to unblock the negotiations.
During our analysis of the legislative proposal for the Equal Treatment Directive we have come to realize the importance of accessibility for persons with disabilities and older people in this context. It has been mentioned several times that the publication of the European Accessibility Act (EAA) would make a huge difference in speeding up the discussions in the Council of the European Union’s Working Party on Social Questions. In fact, the EAA not being published currently blocks the negotiations.
The Commission was supposed to issue a legislative proposal of the European Accessibility Act already in 2012, as stated in the Commission annual work programme 2012, but failed to do so, arguing that more preparatory work needed to be done. Almost three year later, we are still waiting for the Commission to fulfil its promises.
We are concerned that the publication of the proposal has been postponed already several times. As we understand, the impact assessment has been completed. A further delay of the publication of the proposal is therefore difficult to understand for the millions of EU citizens who are expecting this piece of legislation to bring enormous benefits to citizens and to the EU as a whole, and contribute to the economic recovery. We want a legislative proposal containing strong, binding measures at EU level to improve the accessibility of goods and services in the EU single market.
The European Parliament has on numerous occasions expressed its support for, and expectations towards this legislation, most recently in a resolution of May 20th, 2015, on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which also explicitly mentioned the EAA. So we are now counting on your backing to call on the Commission to finalize the proposal and publish it before the end of 2015.
We remain at your disposal for further information and we hope that acting together and speaking with one voice will speed up the process so that we will also be able to move forward with the Horizontal Directive.’
