Marica Miric Biography

Marica Miric has a degree in Traffic Sciences from Zagreb’s University. She has more than 30 years of disability advocacy experience. Throughout her working life, she has been an active disability rights campaigner and has held a number of key positions. She is Bord Member of SOIH and President of Croatian Muscular Dystrophy Association and Zagreb’s Muscular Dystrophy Society and Board Member in Croatian Association of Disabled Workers and Croatian Guide Dogs and Mobility Association. She is a member of Govermental Comittee for Persons with Disabilities as well and Zagreb’s Comittee. She is involved in many Working groups in State and other cities. She is active in EDF as the most representative disability organisation at European Union level and also in Disabled Peoples’International, European Alliance of Neuromucular Disorders Associations(EAMDA) and FIMITIC.

She held a range of positions at community, local, state, national and international boards and committees. She is very active in the disability movement in Balcan Region. She establish stronger alliances among grassroot organizations and build their own capacities to improve their work on rights and empowerment of persons with disabilities and emphasise the “Nothing about us without us” slogan. She collaborate with other social and human rights movements as there are overarching issues shared by all: poverty, social inclusion, and equal distribution of resources in society. To be more inclusive and to promote gender equality she establish SOIH —Women with disability network giving them more space and
encouraging the development of stronger capacities within the wider disability movement and society. She work on the issues of Universal Design, Reasonable Accomodation, Assistive Technologies and accessibility in general specialy in transport field. In work on improving sustainability, she encourage the development of a wider grassroots level disability movement, supporting the building of a new generation of disability activists and leaders to ensure continued action of and within the disability movement. Developing organisational capacities of DPOs so that current and future organisations operate based on a minimal set of standards that ensure transparency, accountability, inclusiveness and good governance within their organisations and for them to become better counterparts to policy-makers and other stakeholders.

She was one of the founders of Independent Living movement and Peer Councelling groups in Croatia.

She was coordinator of preparing Alternative Report for CRPD and to the implementation of CRPD and specialy to implement Concluding Observations of the CRPD Comittee on the rights of Persons with Disabilities. In Croatia she is engaged in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for everyone, living no one behind.