Hundreds of people with disabilities gathered in Brussels to demand a strategic plan to guarantee independence outside residential care homes.
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00:00Our voice matters. Under this claim, hundreds of disabled people from all over Europe have met in Brussels to ask for an end to their segregation from society.
00:11One of their main demands is to close the institutions where many disabled people are interned and facilitate that they can live an independent life outside.
00:20Everything needs to include us. Nothing without us.
00:24Society sees disabled people still as passive recipients of support and this shapes the way support systems are organized.
00:34We need to urgently move away from support types like institutions which force us to remain passive and we need empowering forms of support, especially the personal budget and personal assistant.
00:48Having control of their own life often means being able to leave their homes and participate in society, something that can be promoted by having personal assistants.
00:59We are not asking for something special. We are asking to have the same rights with everyone else, to live in the community, to have the support we need, to have choice and control over our lives like everyone else.
01:13The demonstration passed the European Commission and finished in front of the European Parliament. They asked the EU institutions to come up with a plan for them.
01:23It's not only taking people out of an institution and drop them in society. That's not the propose. People will end up asking to go back in an institution and so we should definitely avoid this.
01:35So we have to need a whole strategic plan, time-related, with financing, with human resources, with technical resources to emancipate.
01:45The protest was part of the Freedom Drive, celebrated every two years to defend the rights of disabled people.