Dear Readers,
As co-chair of the European Network on Independent Living, I congratulate the neurodiverse community to neurodiversity pride day!
ENIL is a disability rights organization with a cross-disability rights approach. We thus fight for the rights of all disabled people, regardless of their impairments. We are not interested in why someone has a disability but the access to our rights according to our individual needs according to the CRPD.
The neurodiversity movement is young and dynamically evolving. We are proud to have so many neurodiverse people within the Independent Living Movement. Some people think that establishing cooperation between people with so many different impairments is challenging because of their intersecting identities but this is not so. Why? Because we are united by the same objectives.
It is not our impairments which disable us, it is the barriers created by society that create that effect and those barriers are the same for all of us. All of us suffer from the lack of support options provided to us. Policy makers are reluctant to strengthen services such as personal assistance and Centres for Independent Living.
As I understand and have learned, in many places it is still not accepted that people with neurodiverse impairments might need access to disability services and authorities tend to deny such requests. We need to make decision makers and society understand that only because your limbs ought to work in theory, they don´t necessarily work in practice. At ENIL we fight for the right for all disabled people to access support services according to their individual needs. They may be needs within the household, administrative support or that of personal assistance.
Many disabled people are at risk of institutionalization. Numerous accounts about the suffering of autistic people in such settings, show us how relevant this is in the context of neurodiversity. When governments decided to remove a ban on forced sterilization from the EU Directive on combating violence against women, they targeted impairments with a genetic factor. ENIL fights for the complete deinstitutionalization, or the replacement of institutions by community-based services, for a ban on forced sterilization and an end to all types of eugenical thinking.
Many disabled people have difficulties in accessing work, completing their education, finding housing or receiving the healthcare they need. ENIL tries to address as many of these topics as we can. Our policy officers are in regular exchange with EU decision makers to push for choice that strengthen the rights of disabled people.
We can only be strong in our work when we have the support of many allies and members. If you want to engage with ENIL, we invite you to come to the Freedom Drive, our main campaign event, taking place between the 23rd and 26th of September in Brussels. For three days we have a packed programme with workshops, a conference, a hearing in the European Parliament and a protest through the EU quarter. Follow us on social media, check out the webpage and subscribe to our newsletter .
I hope to see many of you at the Freedom Drive.
Sincere greetings,
ENIL Co-chair
Jamie Bolling
