Upcoming events
Towards our Accessible, Resilient and Sustainable Societies

On December 1st, The International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD) 2017 was marked at the UN Headquarters in New York under the theme: Transformation towards sustainable and resilient society for all. Governments, persons with disabilities and their representative organizations, private sector and academic institutions gathered together to promote the rights of persons with disabilities and share best practice for building accessible, resilient and sustainable societies.

The event proved opportunity for participants to explore the link between inclusive urban development and sustainable tourism through a human rights perspective, with the aim to forge fruitful partnerships between the public and private sectors and mobilize the different stakeholders to work together to effectively implemented SDGs and Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) for ensuring social inclusion and equal participation.

International Day of Persons with Disabilities
In 1992 the UN General Assembly proclaimed December 3 to be the International Day of Persons with Disabilities with the purpose to attract the attention to the problems of the people with disabilities, to protect their dignity, rights and wellbeing, to stress the advantages, which the society gets in connection with their participation in the political, social, economic, and cultural life.

The UN Convention Concerning the Rights of People with Disabilities stipulates the principle of respect of the specific features of people with disabilities and the main thing – their perception as a part of humankind.

Does the society understand that the main problem of a person with disabilities is not the absence of a wheelchair or prosthetic device and even not the small pension, the main thing for them is to have an opportunity to use the right to live, to get education, to be employed, and to the self-fulfillment Do you know that such outstanding representatives of humankind as composers Frederic Chopin, Johann Sebastian Bach, painters Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, well-known French actress Sarah Bernhardt and many others had serious problems with health, but any person knows their achievements and it did not prevent them from becoming "great".

Isn't it a paradox that Ludwig van Beethoven had the severe hearing problems. One of Presidents of the USA – Franklin Roosvelt, had a severe damage of supporting-motor apparatus and all his life moved around in a wheelchair. Well-known British physics scientists, the author of "black holes" theory, professor Stephen Hawking, who is called the modern Einstein, and, who for over 40 years is wheelchair-bound and can communicate with the world only with the help of the computer speech synthesizer, has taken a flight in a specially constructed aircraft in order to experience the zero gravity state. Just imagine that having such severe disability Hawking researches the fundamental laws of Universe! He, the eighth genius from the list of "100 contemporary geniuses", continues to live the full life, learns the new things, and shares his knowledge with the world!

For this very reason we shall make out society civilized, such, in which the disability will not be a stigma with deep social isolation and distance.

It is important that the government and non-government organizations, and private companies pay attention to the encouraging and innovative measures intended to further apply the international norms and standards in respect of the people with disabilities. The schools, universities and other education institutions must provide the due conditions for their education. The mass media can also make an especially valuable contribution to the support of people with disabilities not only on the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, but also throughout the year to distribute the information about disability, insufficiency of medical services, imperfection of education and professional training; to inform about the achievements and problems in carrying out of social policy, about the programs and projects intended to support the people with disabilities, to promote the arrangement by the society of the necessity of not an abstract humane treatment of people with disabilities, but of certain help in actions, because their activity is restricted by the physical, social, psychological and other barriers.

We live in the epoch of high technologies and computer communications. It is the unique opportunity to use all conditions for the full life of people with disabilities, to provide them with job, and to use all their intellectual capacity.

At the beginning of the XXI century to leave a considerable part of the Earth's population beyond the society is not simply a tragedy, it is a crime! And each person shall decide for himself or herself what he or she can do for the people, who every day challenge the destiny and rise above themselves.