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Adults Aged 65 Years and Over Reporting Some Limitations in Daily Activities (%), 2019: 38.4%
Adults Aged 65 Years and Over Reporting Severe Limitations in Daily Activities (%), 2019: 17.3%

Source: OECD (2021), Health at a Glance 2021: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/ae3016b9-en.

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“‘Independent living’ has been a legally recognised concept in Hungary for 25 years. Over the past few decades, successive Hungarian governments have taken several steps to improve the life of disabled citizens: they developed disability rights legislation, launched disability action plans, ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), started deinstitutionalisation, improved legal capacity and accessibility policies, and adopted progressive sign-language policies. Furthermore, Hungary has received and spent a significant amount of EU funds on physical infrastructure and service development since 2004. Thus, it might appear that the country has created, or at least made significant progress in creating the legal and financial instruments and service infrastructure to support disabled people to live independently and with dignity in the community.

“Available evidence, however, shows a different, rather bleak picture. Over 20,000 disabled people still live in residential institutions, often in ‘medieval conditions’ (Petri, 2020: 13) despite the ‘deinstitutionalisation’ programme that was launched in 2011 with the largest ever budget – drawing on EU funds – allocated to social infrastructure development in Hungary. Meanwhile, services to support people who live in the community have remained very limited and institutional in nature (Kozma et al., 2020). A recent report by the United Nations (2020) pointed out the lack of transparency, inadequate government consultation processes, and reinstitutionalisation funded by public money, including EU funds. Civil society organisations’ space in policy-making has been shrinking due to government attacks, impacting the ability of human rights organisations, including some non-governmental organisations, to promote disability rights (Gerő et al., 2020).”

Source: Gabor Petri, Agnes Turnpenny and Aniko Bernat. When Legislation Is Not Enough. International Journal of Disability and Social Justice. 2023. Vol. 3(1):42-59. DOI: 10.13169/intljofdissocjus.3.1.0042

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“Although the concept of independent living had been known before Hungary ratified the CRPD in 2008, its meaning has evolved over time. Before 1990, state socialist politics oppressed disability activism (Mladenov, 2017): disability policies were defined ‘from the top’, by a centralised single-party system. Early activist writers of the 1980s and 1990s (Ignácz, 2007) had already made the claim that independent living (‘önálló élet’ in Hungarian, which can also mean ‘self-determined life’) was a human right to be guaranteed to disabled people. At that time, independent living was primarily conceptualised for people with a physical impairment, excluding people with an intellectual disability or those with high support needs (Könczei, 1992), not unlike in the early conceptualisations elsewhere (e.g. Dejong, 1979). Parent-lead organisations for people with intellectual disabilities or autistic people emerged after disabled people’s organisations (DPOs) run by those with physical or sensory impairments (Hegedűs et al., 2009; Baár, 2015). Self-advocacy groups of people with intellectual disabilities or autistic people only emerged in the late 2000s.^*1

“It was in this context that the first comprehensive disability rights law entered into force in 1998 (26/1998 Law on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities). Promoted by the DPO-lobby (Ignácz, 2007: 187) and enjoying broad parliamentary support, the new law strengthened disability rights in healthcare, education, and a range of other public services. Progressive pre-CRPD changes included: the establishment of a government advisory body composed of DPOs; consecutive national disability strategies and action plans, with regular reporting and monitoring; and the creation of a ‘disability unit’ in the ministry of social affairs to promote and coordinate policy-making. However, despite the ambition and some achievements, certain disability groups, particularly those of people with high support needs, were excluded from reform proposals. Measures also lacked transformative power. For example, Hungary’s state-socialist heritage included a strong reliance on residential institutions established between the 1950s and 1980s – the dominance of these in service provision remained unchanged after the 1998 law (Turnpenny, 2019). Similar to other countries in the region, instead of developing robust and needs-based social policy, Hungary embarked on neoliberal reforms – adding ‘new injustices to the ones inherited from state socialism’ (Mladenov, 2018: 13). Neoliberal measures are exemplified by the cutbacks of the disability pension system in 2008 and 2012 – as a result, today Hungary has one of the lowest expenditures on disability-related pensions in Europe (Krekó & Scharle, 2021). Critics have pointed out that neoliberalism and consequent maldistribution may be one of the barriers to successful deinstitutionalisation (Mladenov & Petri, 2020). In this context, disability advocacy efforts have also put a stronger emphasis on individualistic, autonomy-focused definitions of independent living (as opposed to more socio-democratic, interdependency based models), giving less attention to how profound socio-economic or political changes may be needed to achieve these (Zalabai, 2009; Baár, 2015).”

Source: Gabor Petri, Agnes Turnpenny and Aniko Bernat. When Legislation Is Not Enough. International Journal of Disability and Social Justice. 2023. Vol. 3(1):42-59. DOI: 10.13169/intljofdissocjus.3.1.0042

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World Health Systems Facts is a project of the Real Reporting Foundation. We provide reliable statistics and other data from authoritative sources regarding health systems and policies in the US and sixteen other nations.

Page last updated October 30, 2023 by Doug McVay, Editor.