Project Title: Towards Improvement of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
Duration: March 1 – October 31, 2019
Donor: The Embassy of the Czech Republic
Legal capacity is the fundamental prerequisite to realizing all other rights, and deprivation of legal capacity carries with itself enormous consequences to the everyday life and freedom of persons with disabilities. Deprivation of legal capacity practically leads to “civil death”, and deprives basic human rights to a person, thus endangering his/her autonomy. Complete deprivation of legal capacity fully excludes any possibility for decision making and enjoying of someone’s rights.
This project aims to improve the position of persons with disabilities and persons whose legal capacity have been deprived, through a free legal aid program, in the form of providing legal advice and direct support through representation in the court. Additionally, the project includes providing support to civil society organizations regarding capacity building in this area. The project will directly empower CSOs to provide better aid to this vulnerable group, and will simultaneously promote the principles of equality and non-discrimination. One of the goals this project aims to achieve is also empowering persons with disabilities, through developing their ability to actively participate in processes that affect the status of their legal capacity.
As part of the project, a legal analysis will be performed based on researching judicial practice in the area of depriving legal capacity and the courts’ obligation to investigate whether there have been reasons to deprive it, as it was envisioned in the Amendments to the Law on Non-Contentious Proceedings introduced in 2014.
