ACTIVIDADES

Royal Monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe | 16–18  December 2025

In its 15^th edition, the jury of the Carlos V European Award granted the distinction to the European Disability Forum, “a European NGO that brings together organisations representing 100 million people with disabilities and their families across Europe. According to the jury’s decision, at the time of receiving the award, the EDF celebrated its 25^th anniversary; a time it has employed defending the rights of people with disabilities and promoting their inclusion, caring for those who need it most and who suffer multiple discrimination for having different capacities, valuing their dignity as people and the great value they are to society. Through its work, the EDF promotes a more inclusive Europe and a more social, just and egalitarian Europe, and contributes to the process of European integration, to the values that the European Union defends and to ensuring that all citizens can live together in this common area on an equal footing and without being discriminated against because of their social capacities. It thus favours a more humane Europe that focuses on the well-being of its citizens, providing strong legal frameworks to defend inclusion, accessibility, freedom of movement, independent life, dignity, non-discrimination, active and effective participation in society, respect for difference as part of human diversity and other fundamental rights and freedoms”. Taking these points into account, and after consulting the award-winning institution, the theme of the Carlos V European Award Doctoral Seminar – European Disability Forum will be: “United in diversity: The impact of the European Union on the lives of persons with disabilities”.

The students who have received the grant will debate the European Union’s contribution, throughout its history, to the inclusion and the fulfilment of the rights of persons with disabilities from the perspective of policy, European funds and initiatives or programmes, from the perspective of regulations and legislation, from inter-institutional cooperation, from the role of associations and collaboration with international institutions, from cooperation programmes with local and regional actors, NGOs and civil society, and from the promotion of European values. In addition, the role of the EU’s ratification in 2010 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) will be analysed, as well as how the Convention shapes and drives disability policies at EU level; the role of the European Institutions and Bodies (with particular emphasis on the European Committee of the Regions and the European Economic and Social Committee) as compared to the role of the Member States of both institutions and other levels of representation; the mechanisms established by the institutions of the European Union to involve persons with disabilities in a meaningful way, and the role of the European disability movement, among other lines of work.