Time: Friday, 8 April, 10:00 – 11:30 CET
Description of the event:
You are denied boarding of a flight because of your disability, even though you have a valid ticket and reservation? You try to enter a local bus, but the driver refuses to deploy the ramp? You are taking the train but the information about the delay is only given via a loud-speaker and you miss the announcement because you are hard of hearing?
EU and national legislation have been developed over the years to fight cases of discrimination in transport against persons with disabilities. But despite those very important laws, the rights of persons with disabilities are often still ignored in practice or simply do not cover all types of transport and incidents.
Over the years, we have noticed a flagrant lack of data on those cases of discrimination. Passengers can lodge individual complaints, but nobody collects those cases systematically. The transport providers are not making their complaints public, and public authorities do not always have the power to demand this information.
So, with the help of the European Commission and a very generous donation from the prize money of the European Railway Awards, we have set up our own Accessibility Discrimination Database, focussing on transport. We aim to make this tool widely known to collect information that is relevant for policy-making and show the real scale of discrimination that is still happening every day in the EU.
With this official launch event we want to raise awareness of the database and encourage EDF members, partners, and the general public to contribute to it.
Draft agenda:
- 10:00 Welcome and housekeeping rules (Marie Denninghaus, EDF Policy Coordinator)
- 10:10 Opening speech by Ms Catherine Trautman, European Coordinator for the North Sea–Baltic core network corridor, European Commission10:25 Live presentation of the database – filing a sample case (Mher Hakobyan, EDF Accessibility Officer)
- 10:45 Questions & Answers
- 11:15 Conclusions by Ms Gunta Anca, EDF General Secretary and Chair of the EDF Expert Group on Transport (tbc)