Do disabled people need protection against discrimination?

By Berit Vegheim

Chairperson of the Norwegian Association of blind and partially sighted academics, SAF

The article is published in REspekt 1/2002. Magazine on disability, rehabilitation and society. Publisher: SKUR (the State Knowledge and Development centre for holistic rehabilitation).

Transulated by Rudolph Brynn, Higher Executive Officer International Affairs, EDF.

Introduction

One year ago, on June 29th 2001, a public commission, the Manneraak Committee, (named after its chairperson Sigurd Manneraak) presented its report “NOU 2001:22 From user to citizen. A strategy for the removing of disabling barriers”. The report presents the status of what we have achieved concerning realising the objective of full participation and equal status in Norway at the threshold of a new millennium.

The conclusion of the Committee is that there still exists a big gap between the overall objective of full societal participation and reality. Furthermore the Committee claims that disabled people are discriminated against. The Committee proposes in Chapter 21 that: "When objectives or needs concerning a group of society are systematically forgotten, it is largely because this group is in too weak a position to defend its own interests – to make these concerns and terms obvious".

The Committee bases this argument among others on the fact that the legitimacy of the public authorities is in no case weakened if this group is disregarded. It will have no consequences, among others because the group has no strong allies.

The Committee presents a substantial proposal for a strategy for closing the gap. The strategy is threefold. The first part of the strategy consists of the following proposals:

- The introduction of an antidiscrimination act.

- The strengthening of existing legislation.

- The establishment of a Supervision Authority on Disability Rights (TFR).

- Strengthened efforts in research and the establishment of a documentation centre.

- The financial strengthening of organisations of disabled people, as well as their influence.

- The municipalities should be obliged to ensure that, as a condition, the needs of disabled people through dialogue is incorporated in all public planning.

The second part of the strategy includes obligatory and binding action plans in three fields, combined with national accessibility standards, finical incitements and binding deadlines. The three main areas of action are:

Full access to transport for all.

Full access to the built environment and public areas.

Full access to information and to information and communication technology.

The third part of the strategy consists of a number of single measures to be launched independently of each other and the rest of the proposed initiatives.

The report has now been circulated for public comment, and more than 100 bodies have made their comments. Among these are, apart from a number of ministries, public bodies like councils, ombudsmen and supervising authorities, organisations of disabled people, municipalities and counties, as well as the main social partners in the labour market.

The response is disappointingly limited, and less than 10% of the municipalities have responded. Also from the point of the media there has been very little interest for this report during the year that has passed, despite the fact that the Committee has presented proposals for measures and instruments that would seem very drastic compared to measures hitherto employed. When taking into consideration that this is the most extensive report that has ever been made on the situation of disabled people in today's Norway, there is every reason to have serious worries about this silence. At the same time it confirms only too well the report’s conclusion that disabled people is a marginalised group, whose interests can safely be set aside without any threat to the legitimacy of the public authorities.

In this article I will take as a point of departure the Committee's assertion that disabled people are discriminated against. Since the most far-reaching proposal in the report is to introduce a specific Act against discrimination, it is in my opinion particularly important to study in depth the very phenomenon of discrimination, in order to clarify the degree of understanding of the connection between the conditions and possibilities of the individual for participation, on which a prohibition of discrimination is based. In the following I will also base myself on viewpoints brought forward in the public consultation responses and the many seminars, meetings and conferences where I have had the possibility to participate.

The debate on a legal prohibition of discrimination has particularly been active during the last five years, in forums focusing on the disability perspective. Apart from that the focus on discrimination, which I will come back to below, has been reserved for women and various minorities like political, religious and ethnic minorities, indigenous people, homosexuals and lesbians.

This means that the debate in Norway on the nature of discrimination from a disability perspective is still in an early phase, and unfortunately neither researchers, social scientists, legal experts, politicians, media, human right groups nor organisations of disabled people themselves have made an effort to put this on the agenda in those arenas where the debate on discrimination is infrequently taking place. To the extent that the debate has been part of the agenda, this has almost exclusively taken place within the auspices of organisations of disabled people, and mainly in their own forums. Which implications this has for the acknowledgement of the fact that disabled people are discriminated against I will also return to later.

First I want to discuss the phenomenon of discrimination from a disability perspective, and then discuss the need to introduce antidiscrimination legislation. Hopefully, I have included the most important arguments that have been presented in favour or against such a prohibition. But most important it is, in my opinion, that this article may be a useful contribution to put discrimination of disabled people on the agenda of public debate, locally and on national level.

What is discrimination of disabled people all about?

To begin with, I will make the following statement on discrimination, which I will elaborate on later:

The question of whether or not one understands or acknowledges that a group is discriminated against, depends on to which degree one believes that the preconditions and possibilities for participating in society depends on human or nature-given circumstances.

In this is implicit that if we are to discuss whether disabled people are discriminated against or not, we must first determine how we define the notion of disability; what does being disabled mean? If we have no common understanding of the notion and phenomenon of disability, the debate is pointless and easily breaks down in artificial disagreement.

In Norway we have had since the 1970s - at least on paper - an understanding of disability as a relative notion, meaning that disability occurs at the time when the individual faces her environments. Disability thus is not an aspect of the person. Still, we may establish the fact that the notion is constantly used in the meaning of a personal distinguishing characteristic, thereby making the message blurry and equivocal. As an example of this bad practise the Manneråk Committee mentions the use of disabled when making statistical surveys. If it is understood that being disabled is determined by circumstances, it is consequently meaningless to measure living conditions for a category of people based on a relative phenomenon like disability.

The Committee proposes to clear up this terminological chaos, and proposes to use the Norwegian notion funksjonsnedsettelse which means the reduction of ability due to sensory impairment, mental disorder, a syndrom or illness etc.

The reduction of ability is there, notwithstanding the situation, while the disability is determined by the changing circumstances. (In accordance with the definition of DPI, Disable Peoples International, I will use the notion impairment instead of reduction of ability in this article.)

I usually illustrate the point like this: a blind person is not disabled when she is talking in the telephone; the blindness is all the time present. I am not disabled at Arlanda airport in Stockholm, but at Gardermoen airport in Oslo - and the reason in this case is only the situation and choice of type of information monitors. Often mere details determine whether a person is disabled in a certain situation or not, and with small improvements for only the price of being willing to do it, may yield dramatic functional improvements. All the time needs for assistance are created, that can only be improved at a price, because of the lack of willingness to guide societal planning in a direction that reflects the fact that the population has varying degrees of functioning.

The report proves that we have failed in reaching an understanding of the fact that inadequate and insufficient societal planning has a direct effect on the degree and extent of disability in the population. The responses also support this conclusion, and in my opinion there is all reason to look for reasons why there is still, in some sectors almost a total lack of understanding of the interrelationship between factors that is a condition for achieving the now 20 year old objective of full participation and equality.

Partly, I believe that this is a communication problem that has to be taken seriously if we are to succeed in presenting our message that disabled people are discriminated against. My experience tells me that the need for a clarification of the notion and phenomenon of disability is great indeed, and that this is the case in all forums; including the organisations and forums of disabled people themselves. To take time for a clarification of notions is always popular among the audience. The medical definition is more common and viable than many people believe, and no doubt contributes to preventing people in seeing the direct links between positive political priorities and decisions, and the extent of disability of the individual.

The ambiguity in the way we use the term disabled is particularly illustrated by the extensive use of the Norwegian term funksjonsfrisk, which can be transulated into something like able and healthy put into the same term. I don't know the origin of this term. It is a term totally without meaning, but at the same time it reveals what kind of thinking that are still dominating people’s attitudes towards person with impairments. The introduction of the term disability was, indeed, a call to account of a way of thinking that the basic reason to the problems was the dysfunctions and lacks of the individual; in an illness or defect that had to be treated or corrected. The notion of disability was meant to get these individuals "off the sick list" and redirect the focus towards the relationship between ability and environment. The term funksjonsfrisk is in a way a protest against this attempt to get people "off the sick list", because the opposite has to be that we are disabled and ill (Norw. funksjons-syk), whatever that means. This use of terms does not contribute to the clarification of the idea that disabled people are being discriminated against.

Furthermore, we must take it seriously that we are operating with a very blurred and far too complicated definition of the term of disability. The official Norwegian definition explains disability as "a disparity between the ability of the individual and the demands of the environments and society in fields that are important for the establishment and continuation of an independent and social life."

Here it is very unclear how important the individual's abilities are in this disparity. The point that there is a disparity (in some definition one also operates with the term "conflict") says nothing about where to focus in order to correct this disparity. There is no clear message that the problem lies in the demands that are made by society in itself. The definition can be interpreted in a way that we are dealing with a static condition; there is a permanent disparity. We do not understand that the demands of society are identical with current policy, and that disability thus is something that is created and upheld as a result of this policy. The Committee uses the term human-made barriers in order to clarify that the barriers are made by society and not natural, which sometimes could be deduced when confronting politicians with the barriers we face in our daily life.

The Committee has obviously succeeded in formulating a clear message, because in a recent conference in which I participated, a representative of the politicians in the city council of the city of Bergen said that he had understood the Committee's definition of the term of disability in such a way, that the real objective is that the category of disabled people is to be exterminated.

In any case we may say that the objective is to get rid of the category of disabled people, which is a result of excluding attitudes and practise in the society. As I will prove later, we need easily comprehensible and obvious messages if we want to make others understand that disability can be reduced if there is a will to achieve this in society. The official definition has proved to be very irrelevant for communication with the surroundings. Such an untraditional and possibly thought-provoking way of presenting the phenomenon, will pedagogically function well in making visible the point that discrimination follows from creating disabling barriers, that is to disable people.

Disabled people are not included among groups that are discriminated
As stated above, the awareness of discrimination of disabled people is very limited, and almost totally absent in the public sphere. This is no doubt because those who are preoccupied with the phenomenon of discrimination and who are raising such issues in public, scientists, politicians and journalists etc., still assume that it is the impairment which is the main cause that some people cannot participate on the same level as the rest of the population. This we can illustrate by making a comparison with discrimination of ethnic minorities and of women. As long as the lower score of Africans' IQ was explained by their racial inferiority, neither the way the test were made nor the interpretation of the results expressed discriminating practises and attitudes. In the same way one did not interpret the lack of participation of women as a result of subjugation of women as long as it was a defensible view that biologically, women were made to take care of domestic tasks and had not the same intellectual abilities as men.

My assertion is thus that disabled people are still at the stage where the lack of participation is explained and defended by referring to biological and psychological causalities, that is that our marginal place in society first and foremost is determined by nature.

The first example proves how we interpret exclusion of persons in widely different ways. A dark-skinned person who is refused entry in a restaurant will be supported when claiming that she is the victim of discrimination, and the following day the case will probably be reported in the tabloid press with ensuing consequences. But restaurants etc. which are not accessible for guests in wheelchairs are not accused of discriminating. Then it is accepted that the place has a staircase, and no articles are written about the fact that this place could have done something to remove the barriers.

The exception in Norwegian legislation, concerning prohibition of discrimination in employment in the §55 A in the Act on labour environment, can paradoxically be regarded as another example of how difficult it is to get support for the view that disabled people are discriminated against. As disabled people in the summer of 2002 achieved the same protection against discriminating treatment in the §55 A second paragraph, as other employment seekers have had previously on the basis of: "sex, colour, sexual orientation, homosexual cohabitation", this happened after many years of struggle from the part of organisations of disabled people. The Parliamentary Committee on Municipality Affairs in the Norwegian Parliament referred in Parliamentary Conclusion (Innst. O.) No 58 (2000-2001) to the fact that the issue had been delayed because an in-depth evaluation of the need to include disabled people in the §55 A had been desired. It is also worth noting that this prohibition was only introduced following the introduction in the EU of an antidiscrimination Directive in this field, including disabled people among the target groups.

One may ask how it is possible to disregard or doubt that disabled people are among the most vulnerable groups in society concerning discrimination. Are there other more feasible interpretation of the fact that unemployment is more widespread among disabled people that others? A fact that politicians should be aware of based on several recent public documents.

Disabled people have little to gain from human rights conventions as well, compared to other discriminated groups. It is fairly typical that the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, CP, and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, ESC, as well as the European Convention on Human Rights are mentioning all conceivable groups of victims that might be discriminated, except disabled people. Here is an example from Protocol No. 12 to the European Convention on Human Rights:

Article 1 - General prohibition of discrimination

1 The enjoyment of any right set forth by law shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status.

When we point out this omission, it is of course claimed that disabled people are included in the rest category of "other status", and in principle this is correct. However, when the systematic omission from all lists of vulnerable groups is combined with a similar systematic omission from the agenda of all forums for debate on discrimination and human rights - for instance when marking the occasion of the 50 years jubilee for the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, articles and other public documents dealing with legal protection against discrimination and in research on marginalisation (sociology, media science, law, social anthropology etc.) - it is very difficult to keep believing that "not mentioned" does not also imply that you are forgotten as well. Often one poses the question of why all these other groups are explicitly mentioned when the Conventions include all people, and why one group persistently is noted for its absence from the listings in such important documents.

In a debating article in the Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen 17th March 2002, PhD scholarship holder Mr. Dag Øystein Engsjø claimed that not all types of discrimination are equally important, but are ranked systematically by the public authorities. According to Mr. Engsjø discrimination of women is ranked as more important than discrimination of ethnical and religious minorities. Further down we find discrimination of homosexuals, and at the very bottom of the ranking list we find: "people with physical handicaps and further below hermaphrodites who are really not encompassed by any antidiscrimination Act”.

Very important and interesting observation, but contrary to Mr. Engsjø, who is strongly accusing the Norwegian Gender Equality Ombudsman and the Director for Gender Equality in his article, I claim that the ranking of groups according to their status, and discrimination of peripheral subgroups within the various discriminated groups, is equally important in order to understand the processes of marginalisation in society. If we are to understand the phenomenon of discrimination, we must not forget that it is based on, and kept alive, through our very own individual and collective discriminating behaviour towards some people, who to us are "the others".

Neither media, nor relevant professional bodies, were present when a Tribunal was arranged during the autumn of 2000, where the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ICCPR, was put to test. The Tribunal was arranged by eight organisations of disabled people joining in a Co-operation Committee for the rights of disabled people. Here the right to vote in secret elections and the right to perform work as elected representative were tested. The Chief Attorney's office in both cases referred to the fact that civil and political rights are exclusively of a negative legal type, meaning that they are to protect the individual against encroachments and infringements from the part of the state, and not to ensure that conditions are adapted to ensure the actual implementation of citizens' human rights. Thus the government has no obligation to ensure that the premises where the publicly elected bodies have their meetings are accessible for wheelchair users, nor to install hearing aid loops for hearing impaired people, or to ensure the necessary resources to making accessible necessary documents for publicly elected representatives with visual impairment or reading impairments.

This clearly proves that the exclusion of disabled people from the listing of particularly vulnerable groups is not a coincidence without consequences. On the contrary, the exclusion is an expression of who were forgotten when they wrote the Conventions. Disability, like for instance illiteracy, is a factor that must be taken into consideration if one is really serious about all citizens having equal civil and political rights. Today these Conventions are inadequate and also point to the fact that in this field disabled people are ignored or excluded as well. In addition both women and ethnical minorities have got their own protecting Conventions. Disabled people still lack their own Convention despite the weak legal protection the general Covenants provide exactly for this group. A new attempt to get a Convention has been launched, but still it is a paradox that the resistance against a disability-specific Convention has been extremely strong, also from the Norwegian authorities. It will therefore be very exiting to see the result of this attempt.

Do disabled people need a law that prohibits discrimination?

The Committee was asked in its mandate to evaluate whether there is a need to strengthen the rights of disabled people, and concluded that in addition to strengthening existing legislation, there is a need to introduce a law prohibiting discrimination on a broad basis. When the Committee concluded that such a strong instrument is needed, this was because of the solid documentary evidence that the gap between reality and objectives proved to be bigger than envisaged in many fields, and that the tools used so far had proven inadequate.

On the reason for the continued gap between ideals and realities, the Committee concluded on page 294:

"The disabling barriers are sometimes of a very varying nature, but for those affected they are nonetheless important. The wide gap between objectives and reality seems to be a conglomeration of problems. However, it is possible to envisage an overarching type of system in this conglomerate. The systematic approach has to do with the way that society is organised and developed. The main problem is that the notion that all should be able to participate and have equal opportunities rarely is included as an important feature in the planning process, the decision making process nor in the concrete formulation of measures. The Committee believes that this is the most important reason for the fact, that we have not to any degree reached the overall objective of full participation and equal status."

As expected the various bodies consulted are of different opinions as to the needs for an antidiscrimination Act for disabled people. For most this is a relatively unusual and outlandish idea, and a tool the effect of which they are very uncertain of.

It is worth noting that there are different opinions both among the municipalities and the various public Councils on disability affairs. The Ministries also make varying signals, notwithstanding the fact that neither of them, except for one, takes a concrete position.

Among the sceptics and opponents some arguments are repeatedly put forward. Warnings are made against believing that legislation in general, and such an Act in particular, will have any effect at all. Partly they refer to the difficulty in making and implementing such an Act, because of its all-including nature. Partly they believe that such an Act will be contrary to the modernisation strategy, which includes simplification and the reduction in governmental regulations. The municipalities are concerned with their self-government, and that such legislation will yield new public expenses that have to be met.

The debate on the modernisation of the welfare state and municipal self-government I will not raise here, because it is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to emphasise that neither the need for simplification and reduction of the level of regulation, not the self-government of municipalities, can have higher priority than the rights of a group of citizens to be protected against discrimination. It would be directly undemocratic to maintain discriminating practices in order to protect the municipality's right to do as it pleases. Since such practices have been uncovered, the Committee wants stronger regulatory means.

Another type of argumentation against a disability specific Act is that this would be a specific legislation that in itself will contribute to the stigmatisation of the group concerned, maintain the image of disabled people as a special group and contribute to their segregation. This line of argument is based on the idea that an antidiscrimination Act will provide disabled people with special rights and advantages that the population at large will not be enjoying; in other words a strategy for preferential treatment.

Here we have reason to point out that an antidiscrimination Act is not an Act proscribing specific entitlements, nor extra benefits, but an Act to ensure that one group of citizens is not deprived of rights or excluded from goods enjoyed by other citizens. Also in cases where such an Act allows for positive discrimination, we are talking about compensating for negative effects and not the allotment of extra privileges.

Again it is important to base ourselves on the reasons for exclusion. When it is not acknowledged that you yourself or somebody else is discriminated, you take for granted that political and other types of decisions are made according to thorough and reasonable assessments that do nobody any harm, and, at least in politics, is to everyone's benefit. But the point is that all the time priorities are made on which concerns are to be taken into consideration, and the Committee believes to have substantiated that the concerns of persons with reduced abilities are rarely considered important in planning processes and societal development. The result is exclusion from participation in many fields like cultural and social activities, the labour market, education and political participation. Furthermore, the Committee concludes that when the concerns of a part of the population to such an extent are systematically disregarded or neglected, one has to regard it as a result of unacceptable attitudes.

An anti-discrimination Act is thus not an Act for special treatment, rather the opposite, because it is to prevent the neglecting and exclusion of a group. It deals both with discriminating actions and attitudes.

It is also vital to differentiate between an Act against discrimination and an Act on distribution of positive benefits like pensions, assistive technology and all kinds of material benefits. In Scandinavia we have made great emphasis on distributive measures, and this has made the Scandinavian welfare model world-wide familiar. But at the same time we have failed in a number of other fields where among others USA and other countries are more developed.

An important reason why USA, Great Britain and some other countries have introduced antidiscrimination legislation is evidently that they want to give all citizens equal status regarding the possibility for participation. Without a social security net like the one we have in Scandinavia, and with a system where many services and arrangements are managed by private providers in a marked, the Americans with Disabilities Act - ADA-, together with other legislation, provided disabled people with a much better basis for making use of existing services and arrangements, and to participate in the Information- and Communication Society. But at the same time we must be aware that when the basic conditions for participation are present, the citizens of the USA are left to their own devises. There is thus no question to copy such a system, rather to obtain both the good legislative framework for participation and the welfare system.

In Norway we have for a long time taken for granted that the welfare state guarantees the correct forward course of society and ensures full participation for disabled people. During the last years we have, however, observed that conditions have worsened in some fields. We have felt the full weight of the inadequacy of "the positive will" as a guarantee for ensuring that various sectors head towards the same objective - full participation and equal status for persons with reduced abilities. In particular we notice that the will to regulate is absent in the transport sector. The enormous investments made in infrastructure and new materials have in recent years created new barriers that we have to cope with. The responsibility for large-scale projects like a new main airport and airport shuttle trains have been left to private enterprises having been left to their own devises regarding design. Thus, we got a new airport with socalled "sound showers", where you can relax and listen to birds singing, but without information monitors in visual height.

A dominant feature of Norwegian politics, that sets us apart from countries that have anti-discrimination legislation, is the reluctance of making use of the possibilities in public procurement legislation, tenders and grants in order to ensure that goods and services from public and private providers are made accessible for all. Producers and providers of goods and services are not responsible to make their products accessible, notwithstanding the level of disability - or to find alternative solutions. Furthermore, the government and municipalities do not make use of their unique positions as main market operators to demand that equipment and products should be developed according to the principle of universal design. Public authorities must to a far larger degree make requirements to recipients of public funding that their enterprises are inclusive, that publicly licenced architects are to prove their competence in universal design, and that architects being granted public contracts from government or municipalities are to base their work on the principle of universal design.

As we have shown, Norwegian authorities neglect to make use of effective management tools that could have yielded relief of public spending in those cases where expensive special measures had to be introduced in order to make up for harm done, and would have represented a major step towards the objective of a better society to all.

Typically Norwegian, maybe, that some of the bodies entitled to comment on the Report recommend user participation as an alternative to legislation against discrimination and to strengthen special legislation is their own sectors. They believe that organisations of disabled people are in a better position to defend the interests of their own members than any legislation.

Experiences from recent years with user participation in the transport sector fully prove that we have a particularly great need for the strengthening of legislation and regulations in this sector. Many issues that organisations are forced to fight for in the user forums that have been established should have been regulated through legislation. When you spend 3 years to achieve an information monitor in visual height at the Gardermoen Airport in Oslo, this does not seem to be a successful strategy. It should be as self-evident that traffic terminals ought to have information monitors in visual height, as to require installation of hearing aid loops and lifts. For people with orientation impairments it is not satisfactory to be left to the mercy of the ideas and aesthetic taste of various architects and designers, as is today the case in legislation on public planning and building.

When the bodies entitled to comment will grant the organisations of disabled people the responsibility for defending the interests of their own members through user participation as an instrument with the current inadequate legislation, the organisations should, in my opinion, be very careful. The experiences from the last years' heavy struggle where the opposite side has been absent (the Norwegian consultation group on public railways, the NSB group, did not meet for 2 years) – they have used reorganisation and lines of responsibility as explanations why nothing was done for a long period and left the organisations themselves to make priorities between measures that make different groups oppose each others. This should tell us that the organisations find themselves in something very similar to a hostage role. We would in my opinion be better served with a strong legislation than with all kinds of user participation.

As a daily user of local trains and frequent air passenger around Norway, I have registered no improvements concerning dazzling lights making it impossible to read information boards and signs. That it is absolutely necessary to place monitors high up in the air contrasted by unending surfaces of external glare, cannot in any way be excused. Actually it should be illegal.

What can we expect from an Anti-discrimination Act?

It is interesting to note that the various ombudsmen and bodies that should defend the interests of different groups are positive to a legal prohibition of discrimination. They also add some good advice, and in particular they emphasise the awareness raising effect of the Act. And it is exactly this point that the Act in itself will affect the actions and way of thinking among people that should be an adequate argument for introducing it as soon as possible.

Today it is legal to discriminate against disabled people in many fields, and it is therefore not sufficient to strengthen existing legislation. There is no Act securing the right of people with restricted ability to read the access to public information, which is a democratic right. In their reply, the Ministry for Justice has, among others, stated that disabled people, like others, are secured by a general protection against discrimination in the legislation. Such a protection has no practical value.

We can mention as one example that students who are delayed in their progress because of their disability have a very doubtful advantage in that they may take up more loans than their fellow students. This regulation is based on reasons of equality, despite the fact that students with disabilities are systematically delayed in their study progress, among others because of inadequately adapted environments, and there is no political will to make any legal commitments to improve the conditions. Both the present and the proposed future system of student loans are unfair and should both be deemed discriminatory.

There are many people who have focused on the need for stronger sanctions, both in today's legislation and in the legislation proposed. If this is not to become a paper tiger, the Act must include sanctions in cases of violation. In addition there must be room for organisations to raise cases on behalf of several individuals, to avoid that the responsibility for changing the world is not left to the individual victim of discrimination. The ability to raise a case must not depend on the financial means of the individual, so assistance free of charge must be available to all who need it. Among others we know from Great Britain that exactly this difference in resources have had the effect that many employers who have been sued, had a stronger position than the plaintiffs, and therefore they prevailed.

It is, however, not an ideal solution that court cases should solve peoples' problems, even if such a solution should remain open. The hope is that the Act will give a strong signal that may prevent the existence of discriminating practises. The Act should provide a clear message to the society that it is acknowledged that disabled people can also be victims of discrimination and that this is illegal. Today no such signals are made and I have in multiple cases showed that there is no public consciousness of the fact that disabled people are victims of discrimination.

Supervising Authority on Disability Rights
To conclude, I would like to make some comments to the proposal to establish a Supervising Authority with the main task of monitoring the implementation of the UN Standard Rules and to prohibit discrimination. This agency is meant to be a monitoring body to reveal and even raise complaints in cases of discrimination.

In several of the responses from among others the Gender Equality Ombudsman, the Centre for Gender equality and the Ombudsman for children, as well as the Councils for the Elderly, the bodies concerned ask for the specific inclusion of their specific perspectives. Some of these could not be dealt with in the report because of inadequate documentation, and because there was no budgetary means available to make such inquiries. At the same time the report has obviously made these "guardians" of various groups’ interests aware of particular conditions they want to correct.

Considering that today's Ombudsman institutions etc. to no remarkable degree have made any initiatives to highlight and criticise discriminating conditions that affect children and women with disabilities in particular, it is very important to reconsider the division of responsibilities when a Supervising Authority is established. There is a danger that such an agency will be regarded as an alibi by the other bodies, so that they may set aside the interests of disabled people completely. If a woman with disabilities is the victim of discrimination because she is a woman, it is the Gender Equality Ombudsman and not the proposed Supervising Authority which is responsible. The Supervising Authority must basically concentrate on discrimination based on disability. Such a division of responsibility would be in accordance with the idea that people with disabilities are citizens entitled to have their rights defended by the same bodies as are available for the population at large.