The year 1981 was proclaimed the International Year of Disabled Persons (IYDP) by the United Nations. It called for a plan of action with an emphasis on equalization of opportunities, rehabilitation and prevention of disabilities. The slogan of IYDP was "a wheelchair in every home", defined as the right of persons with disabilities to take part fully in the life and development of their societies, enjoy living conditions equal to those of other citizens, and have an equal share in improved conditions resulting from socio-economic development.
A major outcome of the International Year of Disabled Persons was the formulation of the World Programme of Action Concerning Disabled Persons adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1982. This also is recognized by the Preamble (f) of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
The International Decade of Disabled Persons ran from 1983 to 1993. It was closed by a speech in the General Assembly by Dr. Robert R. Davila, then an Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Department of Education who declared that "before the year is up, we expect the number of disabled persons to double".
December 3 each year, since 1998, is identified by the United Nations as the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
Ian Dury wrote a song, Spasticus Autisticus, in response to what many saw as a "crashingly insensitive" idea.
Famous quotes containing the words year, disabled and/or persons:
“And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger’s child;”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“That myth—that image of the madonna-mother—has disabled us from knowing that, just as men are more than fathers, women are more than mothers. It has kept us from hearing their voices when they try to tell us their aspirations . . . kept us from believing that they share with men the desire for achievement, mastery, competence—the desire to do something for themselves.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)