Welcome to the word “disability” in article 3 and “disabled” in article 38. Our Constitution will soon take a step forward and give the words the right weight.
This was decreed by the Guidi bill just approved unanimously by the Senate’s Constitutional Affairs Committee, aimed at eliminating terms that are undoubtedly part of an outdated period. We now await the examination and vote in the Senate Chamber, before the subsequent passage to the Chamber of Deputies.
For too long, disability has been described as an individual condition to be compensated, corrected or assisted. Today we know that this is not the case. We know that a person becomes disabled when he encounters obstacles that limit his participation, his autonomy, his freedom of choice. And we also know that those barriers are not inevitable, but the result of political, cultural and social decisions.
This is why the explicit recognition of disability in the Constitution does not only concern the thousands of people with disabilities and their families, but also all of us and the way we imagine cities and schools, work and transport, public spaces and even the language we use every day. It’s about a community’s ability to leave no one behind.
And we know well, on the other hand, that words alone are not enough. No constitutional change will automatically eliminate discrimination, daily difficulties, architectural barriers or those, even more insidious, made up of prejudices and stereotypes. But this step in the Constitution could at least have the power to indicate a direction, to affirm a principle, to remind us what the horizon towards which to aim should be.
So, why not read this reform just like this? Exactly like a commitment: to build a more accessible, more inclusive and more just country. A country that recognizes the person before every condition and that considers diversity as a wealth to be welcomed.
A Constitution remains truly alive when it manages to speak to the present without betraying its original values. And among those values, today as in 1948, there continues to be the dignity of every human being.
