The Congress Board has admitted for processing this Tuesday the reform of article 49 of the Constitution agreed upon by PP and PSOE to eliminate the term “disabled” and replace it with “person with disabilities.” Once this procedure is confirmed, the process to be approved through the fast track begins from now on, foreseeably during an extraordinary plenary session to be held next week, thanks to the consensus solemnized at the end of 2023 by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
This constitutional reform was promoted by the Committee of Representatives of People with Disabilities (CERMI) in 2018 and, together with the support of the then vice president of the Government, the socialist Carmen Calvo, it reached Congress with a unanimous agreement to replace the article with a new one. text “more in line with the new times.”
The agreed wording had the support in the Commission of all the parliamentary groups that then made up Congress, but the political circumstances changed and the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, decided after that Christmas to bring forward the general elections scheduled for April 28, 2019. June 2020. So the Executive project declined when the Cortes Generales was dissolved and ceased to be a priority with another electoral repetition in November and the arrival of the covid-19 pandemic when the new coalition government made up of PSOE began to take shape. and United We Can.
In the following legislature it was resumed and the PP and PSOE discreetly left an editorial closed months ago, but there was no climate or time to carry it out. The appearance of Vox in the parliamentary arc, in addition, also dynamited the repetition of a unanimous agreement, since Santiago Abascal’s party initially neither considered it a priority nor did it trust that Pedro Sánchez’s partners would take the opportunity to open the channel rest of the Constitution.
The journalist Vicky Bendito was the one who took the first step in 2018 by registering on the citizen platform Change.org a proposal to reform article 49 of the Magna Carta and starting a collection of signatures to bring this demand to Parliament with the support of thousands of people. In fact, in a few months she managed to surpass 80,000 signatures.
The idea began to float around in her head after participating in a reading of the Constitution in Congress, where she previously worked for years as a parliamentary reporter for the Servimedia news agency. Bendito chose article 49 and admits that it caused him absolute “surprise” to read that fragment aloud because it was written “from a rehabilitative medical point of view.”
For Bendito, it makes no sense to keep those words in force when the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities agreed and approved in 2006 a change in the treatment of this group, which since then has become recognized worldwide as “people with disabilities.” disability” and has a long list of recognitions for its full inclusion in society, especially in the educational and work fields.
“It is not understandable that, having signed and ratified the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Spain refers to us in its Magna Carta with a term such as disabled,” argued Vicky Bendito’s petition for signatures in June 2018. .
In the purely bureaucratic aspect, the Board will send the text to the Government so that it can rule on its processing, taking into account that the Executive has the power to veto the groups’ initiatives if it considers that they imply an increase in spending or a decrease in income. . But given the previous agreement, it is understood that Moncloa will respond quickly. It could be just 24 hours, as happened with the reform of the Penal Code to eliminate the crime of sedition.
Once there is official approval from the Executive for the processing of the constitutional reform, it can be taken to the Plenary Session.
Constitutional reforms of this type require a minimum support of three-fifths of each of the Chambers (210 deputies and 159 senators), which makes the presence of the two major parties essential.
