Disability commission ‘reluctantly in favour of positive discrimination’

The National Commission for Persons with a Disability (KNPD) said it is now "reluctantly in favour of positive discrimination", after seeing that Maltese socioety was serving as "an unfair platform for persons suffering with a disability".

Long-serving KNPD chairman Joseph Camilleri said today he would never promote positive discrimination had it not been for the way society was viewing persons suffering from a disability.

Camilleri was presenting a draft of the KNPD's annual report on complaints to the commission on discrimination and accessibility problems faced by disabled people.

The official annual report for the Equal Opportunities Act (for persons with a disability) will be issued in 2014.

Whilst Camilleri admitted that awareness and inclusion in the education sector had improved a lot over the years, he said that this was not enough, stressing that more had to be done in other fields, such as at the place of work.

The KNPD said it had acted on 341 complaints this year - 177 of which were carried over from last year. In the 13 years since 2000, when the KNPD started investigating such complaints, the commission has undertaken a total of 1,360 complaints with an average of 105 a year.

Unsurprisingly, the areas where the most difficulties for disabled persons were being encountered were those concerning physical accessibility (104), education (37), and 'everyday' services such as pavement ramps and ATMs (35).

Amongst the places which were found to be either inaccessible or difficult to access were police stations, polyclinics, and various polyclinics around Malta and Gozo.