Limitele libertății de exprimare în mișcarea pentru drepturile persoanelor cu dizabilități din România

The article explores how advocates from the Romanian disability movement perceive the freedom they have in expressing political views and the impact they believe such expressions have on driving policy and service reforms. Building on in-depth semi-structured interviews with nine representatives of self-advocacy and service provider organizations conducted in October – December 2022, we explore how they engaged in advocacy practices during the multiple recent juxtaposed ‘crises’: the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise in the cost-of-living crisis and recent war-induced displacement of persons from Ukraine. We show how despite not feeling limited in the positions that they can take up, representatives of disability movement organizations nevertheless pointed to the intricacies of access to funding and advocating for their rights: both on the one hand, from within funding and political structures that can appear as potentially limiting the freedom of speech or the access to relevant audiences, to the limitations induced by lack of funding pointing to the practical and even personal limitations. As such, the paper shows how both funding inclusion and exclusion can lead to both empowerment and marginalization of the disability movement in policy advocacy. Furthermore, the paper explores how these challenges could be overcome from the perspective of the disability movement, while also pointing to the particularities of the present juxtaposed crises shaping both the policy space and advocacy practices.