Human rights heart: person dignity
Rome, Chamber of Deputies
Queen’s Hall
Marginalization and disability, these two apparently different words are closely linked in the intimate essence of the pain felt by those who live this social and legal status in Italy.
Disabilities in Italy still largely constitute an insurmountable obstacle to access the fundamental stages of a life considered normal, opportunities enshrined as rights by the Constitution: education, mobility, work, free movement and use of public places.
From the latest ISTAT data, a population with marginalized disabilities emerges, living in a real world apart and denied various aspects of everyday life: the result is a country still unable, culturally, organizationally and socially, to adopt a vision that puts focus on the person and his network of relationships and make the services necessary for inclusion and social cohesion usable.
The situation has also led to international recalls and sanctions: in recent years the Court of Justice of the European Union has condemned Italy for not having adequately applied the principles of the European Union on the right to education, work and to mobility. It is increasingly urgent to act on the structural causes of inequalities by creating the conditions that allow people with disabilities to exercise their citizenship rights.
Among the people with disabilities who particularly suffer from this difficult and emergency situation are the disabled civilians. In our country we do not currently have a strong legal framework capable of protecting, promoting and ensuring the totality of the rights to those who, in life, fall ill with a rare disease (in Italy over 2 million people suffer from it and, of these , 70% are children), of cancer, (the new report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the World Health Organization predicts that cases will increase by 60% in the next 20 years), or remain a victim of a road accident (every year in Italy on average over 150 thousand people become disabled due to road accidents).
A series of obstacles – the times to recognize civil invalidity according to Law 104/92 are biblical – prevent these people from deciding their own lives and enjoying their right of citizenship. Today, if there were no support from families, most of the disabled civilians would experience a devastating situation.
Therefore, the approval of a law that equates accidents in life with accidents at work is becoming increasingly urgent: the right to use the best technologies on the market must be guaranteed by the National Health Service; the LEAs and the Tariff Nomenclator must be defined and updated annually, and the update must include the use of the best available technologies, necessary to deal with serious diseases and disabilities; a Commission must be set up to ensure an effective system for identifying the services and devices that can be provided, appointed by the Government with specific decrees and made up of people of proven professionalism and competence, chaired by both the President of the National Health Service and the Director of the Medicines Agency .
I hope that the Draft Law on the Equalization of Injuries in Life with Accidents at Work, which we have been working on for some time, will arouse attention and constitute, for institutions at all levels, a stimulus to take on the full implementation of the rights enshrined in the Constitution, creating a preferential lane for the (today) weaker people.
Salvatore Cimmino