Celebrated two years of Interparty Parliamentarian Lobby Group

The Parliament will become accessible for disabled people, too
 

The fifty-year old woman from Skopje Marija M. lives with her three children in a flat of thirty square meters. Her twenty-year old son is a disabled person who needs care, but he does not receive any financial help. The Ministry of Labor and Social Policy explains that there has been a lack of forms for a month, where findings, evaluation and opinion are written in qualify for this grant and that it is the reason why doctors’ commissions for evaluation of work ability are not operating. However, even before the lack of forms occurred (during the winter), the commission members were not carrying out the inspection in the homes of people who cannot take care of themselves.

These problems now, unlike two years ago, do not bother state institutions only, but also the interparty parliamentarian lobby group, one of this kind in Europe (besides the one in the Euro-Parliament), dealing with the rights of people with special needs. This group has recently celebrated two years of its existence when a campaign for civil initiative collecting 10.000 signatures was promoted, for passing a system law for handicapped people. The objective of this law is to set a wider frame for passing other laws from these sphere, as well as putting the law regulation in accordance with the new law. At the celebration the President of the Parliament, Ljupco Jordanovski, promised to provide access for disabled people in the legislative house. So far, there has not been such accesses to the Assembly and the cabinets of the members of the parliament.

“The Parliament will finally become accessible for disabled people. A project has been made for adjusting the entries and next month I expect the building process to start. Since the very beginning of the establishing of the group we have been striving for this, as well as for passing concrete legal initiatives”, says Liljana Popovska, president of the Inter-parliamentarian lobby group. In her opinion, in the course of the previous two years, they, as a lobby group, have achieved certain improvements for the people with special needs. “A Declaration has been passed for advancing the rights of these people in the Parliament, the texts have been improved in certain laws and rulebooks. Participation for orthopedic aids has been decreased from 40% to 10%. Changes have been made in the Law for social help for individual users of certain benefits. The texts have been improved in the Law for spatial and urban planning and the Law for building and we have given amendments that have been accepted by both the commission and the minister. With these two laws we expect to prevent the opportunity to build or project without taking into consideration overcoming spatial barriers, so it has been projected the buildings to obligatorily have accesses”, says Popovska.

She points out that the real condition of disabled people is bad. “Most of them live in poverty, closed in walls without an opportunity to earn on the basis of their abilities and to feel dignified, as independent and productive people. Instead, they are most often left with a bitter feeling of excessive, as a burden to others”, says Popovska.

According to her, we have laws that regulate disabled people’s problems and generally those of people with special needs, but there is no implementation of laws as a result of the weak functioning of the state institutions as a whole, which makes this group helpless for the most part.

The president of the IPPL group illustrates the condition of people with special needs through the example of allowance for external care and help. It is about financial support of certain category of people, mostly people with invalidity or disability. Popovska, as president of the IPPL group has received complaints or personal stories from the interested, because it is difficult to realize this right.

“There are defects on every level. The legal base for allowance is unrealistically low (up to 30% of average salary) and it does not cover the costs in cases when help is to be offered for the whole day. This mistake concerns the Rulebook, where there is no appropriate gradation of the criteria for receiving allowance. The procedure for qualifying for the allowance is complicated and expensive and it sometimes looks like a horror story in practice. Expert commission’s visit is sometimes expected for several months. We have recently heard that the lack of forms is the reason and last year the reason was the lack of vehicles to visit the clients”, explains Popovska adding: “Controls of the right for allowance are carried out every six months, even at the ones with permanent physical invalidity. What does the commission expect to see after six months?! Unsaid things, bureaucracy, indifference, mistakes, on the other hand a mass of people who cannot realize their rights”, she says.

After the IPPL group’s analysis of the conditions with external care and help that they have sent to the authorities, certain measures have been taken for revision of the complaints, but just briefly. Therefore, Popovska emphasizes that anti-discriminatory legislation is to be provided and to apply policies of social inclusion. She adds that various funds are available for these aims. “Good cooperation between the government, the parliament, the civil society sector and experts is necessary, not only declaratively, but also successfully and honestly, on several levels. Suggestions should be understood as well-intentioned because we all need good regulation of these issues. Some are directly affected and others need to share a part of their civil responsibility with them. And all together to arrive faster to the promised Europe”, points out the president of the IPPL group.

 

Analysis 
 

The Inter-party parliamentarian group for rights of people with special needs has made an analysis for this category of people and their problems in relation to receiving external care. They have realized that there is a complicated and expensive procedure for providing the whole necessary documentation. “One and the same subject goes twice through the same hands at the commission for finding and evaluation and the people from the Center for social work. Additionally, low salaries and insufficient information of the people who make the demands should be taken into consideration and they often go from desk to desk“, says their analysis, where the group suggests to make this procedure simpler and to think of reducing the price of documentation that costs about 1.500 denars. According to IPPLG, the period for establishing the factual condition by the commissions for finding and evaluation is very long, it lasts for months and not all people with intellectual disability over 26 are covered. The group points out to unprofessional, bureaucratic and arrogant communication with the clients by some representatives of the institutions of the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy. IPPLG also states some problems and unnecessary stresses with revision every six months for the people with permanent invalidity, then abolishing the allowance immediately after the revision, according to a subjective finding, or the user has not been at home, or as alleged mistake. According to them, a problem is also the unrealistically low allowances, mixing the reason and the consequence from the injury that has led to invalidity, lack of well-founded categorization of allowances according to the need for external care.

 

Buses for everyone 

According to the European Union directive, each country is to provide buses that are completely accessible for disabled people and people with limited abilities. The buses should be low, with obligatory ramps or lifts, with priority seats, with a place for a wheelchair, with a place for a guide dog and contrast colors for people with damaged eyesight. This directive is a part of the European action plan for equal opportunities for disabled people, passed in November 2003 by the European Commission. The action plan is much broader: access to employment, new technologies and strengthening disabled people, access to the public life and active civil involvement in all life trends. The European picture of the degree of integration of disabled people will be seen in the Report on realization of this plan, expected by the end of 2005.

 

Ministry of Labor and Social Policy
Commissions work on field

At the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy they say that the problem with lack of forms has finally been solved and the commissions have started to work on field in order to establish factual conditions for offering help and external care to those who need it. This condition, that lasted for months, caused problems to more than 1.500 people with special needs, since they were not receiving the necessary financial help to provide care from someone else.

The allowance for care of another person is 3.300 and 2.900 denars a month and is now given to about 5.000-6.000 disabled people in the country. A right to help for external care has every person who cannot do basic functions by himself, but not for those who can move in a room and can feed themselves all on their own.