The Strategy for culture and national heritage 2016-2022 includes several measures to develop the adjustment of the infrastructure and the physical milieu of culture, in general, to the needs of disabled people:
- Promotion of cultural expressions specific to the urban and rural culture in a certain area, inclusively through formats adjusted for disabled people;
- Development of services and infrastructures of information on the local and regional cultural offer and heritage values that can become touristic landmarks, including cultural routes accessible to people with disabilities;
- Set-up and development of local and / or sectoral creative-innovative hubs and clusters, considering from the start the need for ICT equipment and the principle of accessibility for people with disabilities as well as the possibility of using assistive devices and technologies;
- Drafting evaluation norms for all categories of moveable cultural heritage, disabled people’s access included;
- Analysis and harmonisation of legislation protecting intellectual property rights, so as it would not represent an unreasonable or discriminatory barrier for the access of disabled people to cultural products;
- Elaboration of cultural materials in formats accessible to disabled people or equipment with access technologies (defined in the National Strategy A society with no barriers for disabled people, 2016-2020).
Once the Convention on the rights of people with disabilities was ratified by Law no. 221/2010, Romanian Government recognised the right of disabled people to equally participate in the cultural life and it pledges to take all the adequate measures to ensure that disabled people:
- benefit from access to cultural materials in accessible formats;
- benefit from access to television programmes, movies, theatre and other cultural activities, in accessible formats;
- benefit from access to places dedicated to performances or cultural services, such as libraries, theatres, museums, cinema theatres or travel services and, to the greatest possible extent, from access to monuments and sites of national cultural importance.
Furthermore, Romania pledged to take all the necessary measures, in accordance with the international legislation, to ensure that the laws protecting the intellectual property rights do not have a unreasonable or discriminatory barrier for the access of disabled people to cultural products.
The National Strategy A society without barriers for people with disabilities 2016-2020 mentions a number of 752,931 disabled people in 2015. Around 48% of these persons lived in rural areas, and, at the end of 2014, 70,493 were children. One of the general objectives of this strategy is ensuring the full participation of disabled people in all the fields of life, via access to public transport, to information, mass media and other facilities, which means access to cultural life, inclusively.
The multi-annual strategy was approved in 2018. It confirms that the participation in leisure or sports activities, the freedom to develop spiritually and the access to the values of national or universal culture are all guaranteed by the Constitution.
The limited access of people with disabilities to cultural activities pertains less to their difficulties and more to external, environmental, communication or attitude-related barriers. Therefore, one of the assumed objectives of the respective strategy is providing them access to non-formal education programmes, to sportive, cultural, leisure and recreational activities. As a matter of fact, Law no. 448/2006 on the protection and promotion of the rights of impaired people provides that “the competent authorities of the public administration have the obligation to facilitate the access of people with handicaps to the values of culture, to heritage-, touristic, sports and leisure sites”, inclusively by offering free access to performances, museums, artistic manifestations and sports activities (for children and adults with severe or pronounced handicap).
Comments are closed.