People with intellectual disabilities denied voting rights in seven EU countries

People with intellectual disabilities are legally impeded when it comes to voting in seven EU countries, bringing about a de facto lack of access to voting in the European elections in June, the director of Inclusion Europe campaign group told Euractiv in an interview.

Inclusion Europe campaigns for the rights of people with intellectual disabilities, estimated at some 20 million in Europe, according to the organisation’s data.

A person with intellectual disability needs a guardian to assist them while casting their vote. However, since in Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Portugal, and Slovenia only one person may enter the polling station, people with intellectual disabilities are subsequently denied the right to vote in European elections due in early June.

“Some people are unable to make decisions on their own and they have therefore been assigned a guardian,” Milan Šveřepa, director of Inclusion Europe, explained, pointing out that these countries are violating the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which the 27 EU member states adopted.

“In these seven countries, the case can go to court and the judge can decide if the person can vote or not,” Šveřepa specified.

“In other 15 countries people with intellectual disabilities cannot stand as candidates,” the director of inclusion Europe explained. More specifically, such restriction apply in Belgium Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Malta, Portugal Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Switzerland.

There were roughly 101 million people with all kinds of disabilities in the EU in 2022, Eurostat showed, and during the last European elections, roughly 800,000 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, sensory, physical, and mental disabilities,” Šveřepa explained, and specified that some disabilities can be combined, making the assistance, usually conducted by family members, more complex.

Intellectual disability impacts the ability to acquire knowledge and skills. It affects intellectual and educational processes and brings about challenges in a specific social context.

The lack of proper support for people with disabilities causes a significant lack of access, for example, to employment, housing, healthcare and many other significant aspects of modern society, including access to voting.

For instance, there could be not only legal, but “physical obstacles to access the polling station” for people with physical disabilities, and “access to information” for people with intellectual disabilities.

On the latter subject, 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” the director of Inclusion Europe explains.

“For the EU elections, the European Parliament already created a new page with easy to read information,” he added.

In only six European countries, EU members Finland, France, Spain, and Sweden, and also in the UK and Norway, people with intellectual disabilities have full access to voting rights. “This means EU countries have to do much more to make elections more accessible for people with disabilities,” the director of Inclusion Europe concluded.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]