II. Participation in Civil and Political Affairs
Relative to the enhancement of full participation of the sector in civil and political affairs, NCWDP also worked on the enactment of the Party-list System Act or RA 79421 Identified as among the basic marginalized sectors, persons with disabilities entered the electoral contests in 1998, 2001, 2004, 2007. None of the efforts however succeeded in electing representatives with disabilities in the Congress. While in part the failure could be blamed to disunity within the sector, the main cause however is the departure of the Implementing Rules and Regulations from the original aim of RA 7941 which is to ensure the representation of the marginalized sectors in the House of Representatives.
- Note #21
- Republic Act 7491
- Return
Due to the manipulations of powerful political and economic sectors the Implementing Rules and Regulations of the Party-list System Act set the situations where the weaker and less populous sectors (like that of persons with disabilities, senior citizens, indigenous, etc.) were required to compete with the larger sectors (like that of the women, farmers, laborers etc.) The worst part was the entry of the business sectors and multi-sectoral Parties in the electoral struggles. The observation was expressed by one of the nominees of Alyansa ng May Kapansanan Party (AKAP) Oscar J. Taleon, a blind leader and President of Philippine Blind Union (PBU).He further states that the given Party-list System Act requires the garnering of at least two percent of the total number of vote casts for the Party-list participants to qualify for one seat in Congress and that most persons with disabilities and their families are uneducated and non registrant voters, the chances to acquire the required two percents are extremely limited.
It should be noted that in the ADB study22 that one percent of the total population of the Philippines were categorized as persons with disabilities while the World Health Organization (WHO) declares that at least 10 percent of every population are persons with disabilities. There are continuing attempts to amend these implementing the recent provisions by making sectoral parties compete against one other with those garnering the highest number of votes being entitled to represent the sector in Congress.
The leaders and advocates of the sector acknowledge the imperative of solidarity to attain the objective of legislative representation. With this aim, the movement of unity persists. While, they (the leaders and advocates of persons with disabilities) respect the rights of each of the disability groupings to represent the group (that is the deaf represented by the deaf, the blind represented by the blind, etc.) however, they too recognized the need to work together as one solid sector of Filipinos with disabilities to accomplish common goals.