Milan Šveřepa wrote this report from the 21st Europe in Action conference in Vicenza. The report was published in Anffas’ newsletter La Rosa Blu.
Five hundred people gathered in Vicenza in May for the 21st Europe in Action conference. People with intellectual disabilities, their families, self-advocates, professionals, and policy makers from across Europe. Three days of workshops, debates, and shared stories, hosted by Anffas under the theme Together for Inclusion.
What struck me most was not the size of the event, but a sentence from Maureen Piggot, who served as president of Inclusion Europe for many years. “Families hid their children with intellectual disabilities,” she said. “And now that does not happen.” The room had that mix you only get at events like this: pride in how far things have come, and urgency about how far there is still to go.
Europe knows how to support people to have a good life included in the community. Let’s build on that to finally end segregation and isolation.
That is the message I would send to any European institution, any national government, any funder reading this. We are not starting from scratch. We know what works. The question is whether we are willing to invest in making it work for everyone.
One million people. Still.
Around one million people with intellectual disabilities are still living in segregated institutions across Europe, according to the Inclusion Indicators 2025 report. And new institutions are still being built, including with EU money.
Slovenia is an example of the contradiction we are living with. The country has a national strategy to move 75% of institutionalised people into the community within ten years. At the same time, in the last three years, two new closed units have been built where children with intellectual disabilities are restrained. European funds going one way, national funds going another.
Lithuania shows what early, sustained investment in community support looks like. A new case management model has already supported over 1,000 people, with 90% of municipalities on board. Since 2024, supported decision-making is part of the national support system, and peer support workers with lived experience are paid for their work. That last part matters. It is a first in Slovenia too. Lived experience being treated as professional contribution, not just goodwill.
Roberto Speziale of Anffas put it plainly: closing institutions without building alternatives is not deinstitutionalisation. Living at home without enough support is not independent living either. Real independence means choices: where to live, with whom, and with the support that makes it possible.
The law is only the beginning
Legal capacity – the right to make your own decisions – came up in almost every session. And in almost every country context, the same frustration: the law says one thing, practice does another.
The laws work good on paper, but not in practice.
That was said about Catalonia. It could have been said about Italy, Lithuania, or most places in Europe. In Italy, the 2025 reform of legal capacity introduces new protections and moves closer to UNCRPD standards. But as Anffas’s legal expert Corinne Ceraolo Spurio pointed out, the previous system – designed to support people – was routinely turned into a tool of incapacitation. The problem is not only the law. It is culture.
In Catalonia, Som Fundació supports 860 people through supported decision-making. In Lithuania, lawyers are specifically tasked with defending the rights of people with disabilities. These are things that work. What they share is investment in both legal frameworks and in the professionals who apply them.
The workshop also raised a harder question: what about people with complex support needs, people with specific communication needs? Reforms have often left them out. The conference called for interpretative support to be written into law, so that the right to decide becomes real for everyone, not just those who communicate in conventional ways.
The people at the centre
Mattia works in a biscuit-making project in Italy. He told the conference he had been reluctant at first. He thought he could not do it. Then he said: ‘This project has changed me. I have realised I have potential that goes beyond my disability.’
Manuel Carboni plays sport. Before, he said, he used to look out of the window and watch people go by. Now he trains alone, organises his own transport, goes to birthday parties without his parents. Below 3% of people with intellectual disabilities participate in sport regularly. Manuel is evidence of what the other 97% are being denied.
A self-advocate from Greece told about here experience when she said at a conference she wanted to work in a pharmacy. Because local authorities were in the room listening, a real opportunity followed. When people speak, and others actually listen, things change. Before, other people spoke for us. Now we speak for ourselves.
Participation needs investment
There is currently no direct EU funding mechanism for self-advocacy groups led by people with intellectual disabilities. That needs to change. Participation that depends only on voluntary work and short-term projects is not real participation. If decision-makers say participation matters, they must also invest in it.
The same is true for employment. The typical employment rate for people with disabilities across Europe sits around 50%. For people with intellectual disabilities, it is below 10%. It is the result of decades of under-investment in inclusive education, in employment support, in changing the attitudes of employers. Only 23% of people with intellectual disabilities in employment have a long-term contract.
What we are asking for
Italy’s disability reform – the Life Project, the new legal capacity framework, the National Authority on Disability – shows what serious reform looks like. These are not finished achievements. They are works in progress, and they need continued investment and the honest acknowledgement of what still does not work. But they are also a model for what it means to take the UNCRPD seriously.
The conference ended with a shared message for European institutions and national governments. Stop funding institutions. Monitor deinstitutionalisation with real data and real accountability. Invest in self-advocacy directly. Make inclusive education the norm, not the exception. And listen to people with intellectual disabilities when making decisions that affect their lives.
Europe knows how to do inclusion. Many people at this conference described how their world changed over the past ten or twenty years. They know their rights. They went to school, have a job, take part in self-advocacy. Governments are changing laws. Things are moving.
What we need now is to make that work for everyone. Not only for the people who happened to be in the right place, with the right support, at the right time. An Italian self-advocate put it best at the closing session: La battaglia non è finita. The battle is not finished.