Milan Šveřepa, director of Inclusion Europe campaign group, stated that people with intellectual disabilities face legal barriers to voting in seven EU countries, resulting in a de facto denial of access to vote in the European elections in June.
Inclusion Europe advocates for the rights of people with intellectual disabilities, of whom the organisation estimates there are around 20 million in Europe.
Since only one person can go to a polling station in Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Portugal and Slovenia, people with mental disabilities who need a guardian to help them vote are subsequently denied the right to vote in the European elections in early June.
Šveřepa claimed that these countries were violating the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted by all 27 EU member states.
“Some people are unable to make decisions on their own and they have therefore been assigned a guardian. In these seven countries, the case can go to court and the judge can decide if the person can vote or not.”
He also noted that “in the other 15 countries people with intellectual disabilities cannot stand as candidates”. This restriction applies in Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Malta, Portugal Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Switzerland.
According to Eurostat, the EU had about 101 million people with all types of disabilities in 2022. During the last European elections, some 800,000 people were denied the right to vote, according to a report by the European Economic and Social Committee.
Intellectual disability is a category within different types of disabilities. For instance, there are, among others, sensors, physical, and mental health.
Šveřepa specified that some disabilities can be combined, which complicates the assistance usually provided by family members. Intellectual impairment affects the ability to acquire knowledge and skills, posing problems in a particular social context.
Lack of adequate support for people with disabilities results in significant lack of access to employment, housing, health care and many other significant aspects of modern society, including access to voting.
For instance, there may be not only legal but also “physical obstacles to accessing the polling station” for people with physical disabilities and “access to information” for people with intellectual disabilities.
The director of Inclusion Europe stated that institutions “should produce easy-to-read information, which essentially consists of simplified versions of instructions such as, how to vote, parties’ manifestos and the pages of the candidates.”
“For the EU elections, the European Parliament already created a new page with easy to read information.”
Only in four EU member states – Finland, France, Spain and Sweden – as well as in the UK and Norway people with intellectual disabilities have full access to the right to vote.
This means EU countries have to do much more to make elections more accessible for people with disabilities.
