Objectives and Activities

Objectives

The first objective of the project is to produce training and awareness of EU law and concepts embedded in it, such as direct, indirect and positive discrimination and the duty to make accommodation, in relation to the Directive.

The intended outcomes will equip the NGOs with an understanding of the operation and enforcement of EU law, and the extent and circumstances to which nationals can rely on it for protection. NGOs would also be equipped to train others, to raise awareness more generally and to influence national strategy. A second objective is to produce training and awareness of how anti-discrimination law is enforced and used in Member States.

A third objective is to assist the NGOs in producing a strategy for dealing with obstacles to the effective implementation of the directive in each state. The final long-term objective will be the establishment of enduring national and multi-national networks to co-operate on campaigning and funding opportunities.

The first preparatory phase of the project ran for six months from March 2004. During this time planning meetings for the whole team were held in Cluj and London at which the outline content and format of the training courses was planned, and visits were made to project partners in Galway and Budapest. However, the most important aspect of the first phase was the series of visits to initiate contacts with disability NGOs in participating countries.

Activities

Within the second phase of the project (begun in December 2004), training workshops were held in order to help empower locally based disability NGO activists in some of the new Member States and the Accession States to become conversant with the disability discrimination aspects of EU Directive 2000/78/EC and its practical effect on the laws of their States, and to use it thereafter to the positive benefit of disabled people at work. The participants of the training sessions benefited from the knowledge and experience of those monitoring its current transposition into European Union domestic legal systems. A deep understanding of the potential strengths and limitations of the EU Directive 2000/78/EC in the fight against discrimination in employment provided a solid base upon which the candidate country NGO trainees chave been able to prepare the groundwork for the Directive's transposition into their own domestic laws.

The individuals primarily targeted within the candidate countries are disability NGO activists and advocates, who are already engaged in working on disability rights issues, and who are de facto representatives of potential and actual victims of discrimination within the spheres of employment and training.

Training workshops took place in Romania, Bulgaria and Lithuania in 2005, and two additional sessions were held in Hungary and Estonia in early 2006. The Center for Policy Studies hosted a three-day workshop in Hungary on 27-29 March, which was led legal experts in discrimination law from Ireland, the United Kingdom and Hungary.