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At March 17 regular sitting, the NA Standing Committee on Health Care and Social Affairs debated the draft law on the Rights of Persons with Disability and the package of three other draft laws authored by the RA Government and a group of deputies from the NA My Step Faction.

The RA Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Mesrop Arakelyan considered necessary the adoption of the package, substantiating that the law in force passed in 1993 is out of date now and does not correspond to the needs of the persons with disabilities. According to the Minister, the draft laws that create necessary legal bases for ensuring the protection of the rights for the persons with disabilities, equal opportunities and available conditions, the execution of their rights in all spheres of public life, excluding the discrimination on the basis of disability. It is particularly designed to establish degree of restriction of the person’s functionality instead of groups of disability: light, medium, heavy and deep. The assessment of disability will be carried out, being based on the ideology and approaches of the WHO functions’ international classification. The Ministries of Labor and Social Affairs, of Health and of Education, Science, Culture and Sport, the NGOs supported with the UN and the EU revised the assessment tools, the methodological guidelines and the business processes concerning the person’s functionality assessment. Experiments were carried out in several phases. The investment programme of the disability assessment system reforms and the person’s functionality assessment system was revised and submitted to the Government.

If the legislative package is passed, the persons’ functionality assessment will be operated from September 2022.

The Committee Chair Narek Zeynalyan positively assessed the package, underlining that it would almost exclude the corruption phenomena existing in giving disability order, as the Assessment and Evaluation Commission would be formed on the previous day of the examination assessing the functionality. Narek Zeynalyan especially highlighted the fact that to assess the person’s functionality the specialists involved in the registry to be formed would be elected from the electronic bank by the principle of chance.

The package with the endorsement will be proposed to include in the draft laws of the agenda of the sixth session of the NA seventh convocation.