The European Disability Forum (EDF) welcomes the preparation of a new EU Strategy on Victims’ Rights. Persons with disabilities face an increased risk of becoming victims of crime, including violence, abuse, exploitation, hate crime and gender-based violence. They also continue to encounter significant barriers when reporting crimes, accessing victim-support services, participating in criminal proceedings and obtaining effective remedies.
These barriers include
- inaccessible information and communication;
- inaccessible police stations and courts;
- the lack of procedural accommodation,
- discriminatory stereotypes regarding the credibility of persons with disabilities,
- and the absence of accessible and confidential reporting mechanisms.
Women and girls with disabilities, children with disabilities, persons with intellectual or psychosocial disabilities, persons living in institutions and persons deprived of their legal capacity may face particularly serious and intersecting forms of discrimination.
The new Strategy should therefore explicitly recognise persons with disabilities as rights holders and ensure that they can exercise their rights on an equal basis with others. It should be fully aligned with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the revised Victims’ Rights Directive, the European Accessibility Act and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), in particular Articles 12, 13, 16 and 19. The EU and all its Member States are notably bound by the CRPD, which requires the elimination of barriers to justice and the provision of appropriate support and accommodation for persons with disabilities.
EDF recommends that the Strategy includes the following measures:
- EU guidelines on procedural accommodation for victims with disabilities;
- Disability-inclusive actions to improve identification and reporting of crime in closed and segregated settings;
- Actions on accessibility of victim-support services, including an assessment of national helplines;
- EU-wide awareness campaign on victims’ rights that explicitly includes victims with disabilities;
- Actions to strengthen participation, monitoring and accountability, including by broadening participation in the Victims’ Rights Platform, to additional representative organisations of persons with disabilities, and through the creation of a monitoring system for the Strategy.
We give more information about what each measure would entail in the position paper.