There is a space. Reports: it's a small tile, a rectangle you can click on. It's found on the website of the National Guarantor Authority for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: by writing, you can try to truly make your voice heard. Established in 2024 and operational since the following January 1st, the Authority has recently published its first annual report: after recounting the initial steps taken to structure and organize itself, the text mainly looks to the future. And if it does what it says it will, the road ahead looks very interesting.
A young institution, still little known, the Authority nonetheless received around 1,300 reports in 2025 — not a high number in absolute terms, but a significant one: it reveals the need for an institutional presence capable of stepping in when the guarantee of rights breaks down. Direct testimonies, these reports act as a mirror: they show how, for people with disabilities, rights are still conditional, intermittent, hard-won, often left to the discretion of a single office or region. And – as the Authority itself acknowledges – when a problem keeps recurring, it's no longer an isolated incident but a structural flaw; when a right varies from case to case, it becomes a privilege for the few. The Authority's message is clear: a person with a disability should not have to negotiate, every single time, something that is simply their right.
Many reports concerned schools, where it shouldn't be the student with a disability who has to adapt to the system, but the other way around. With this in mind, for example, last year the Authority exercised its legal power to take legal action, addressing the problem of continuity in support-teacher assignments. Because continuity in teaching is a right, not a matter of luck.
Many reports also concerned the granting of personalized parking spaces: even for those entitled to them, these are often left to the discretionary choices of municipal administrations, as if they were a favor rather than a right. Other reports concerned the rights of those who care for a family member with a disability on a daily basis, and others still concerned healthcare: among other things, it emerged that people with disabilities often face healthcare, organizational, and relational barriers. The difficulty, in fact, isn't just getting into a hospital, but then being cared for in a comprehensive, respectful, and ongoing way.
The Authority therefore carried out on-site inspections following reports concerning the lack of accessibility for people with motor, visual, hearing, cognitive, or relational disabilities. Train stations and transport infrastructure were inspected, checking for the presence of access routes and whether they actually worked: because a broken elevator is a barrier, an unusable ramp turns a train into a mirage, a broken tactile path undermines personal safety, and a lack of maintenance turns mobility into a risk. Checks were also carried out on beaches and other summer leisure spots, because the lives of people with disabilities also include free time, culture, sport, social life, and holidays.
As for visits to facilities that host vulnerable people, the Authority's aim is to verify not only their safety and organization, but also how much they genuinely foster social participation, freedom of choice, and relationships — identifying situations of risk or isolation. This is a form of protection directly tied to the issue of deinstitutionalization: monitoring the quality of life of people with disabilities in these facilities means checking whether pathways to independence have actually been set in motion, whether a person's life plan is genuinely being pursued, or whether staying in the facility is simply the result of having no alternative.
Another area of action has been – and must continue to be – overcoming legal incapacitation. The Authority is committed to helping rewrite current legislation, particularly to move beyond the legal instruments of full and partial incapacitation, and to reform supported administration. Full legal incapacitation, in fact, in its traditional form, is based on a substitutive logic that no longer fits the modern notion of human rights, and must be replaced with support tools that better respect individual will and preferences. What's needed is protection that doesn't erase the person, safeguarding without total substitution, legal certainty without violating self-determination.
Still, in order to act well, knowledge is essential — and in Italy, statistical knowledge on disability remains insufficient, fragmented, and unevenly distributed across regions. Here too, the lack of consistent data isn't merely a statistical shortcoming, but a structural problem. Take the case of the