Vnm Day for Ppl with Disabilities

Sympathy and protection

The Law on Persons with Disabilities has been an optional course at one of the Viet Nam’s top law schools since 2012 with the support from the International Labour Organization and the Irish Government.

News | 18 April 2014

A group of student receive a scholarship for their excellent presentation on the Law on People with Disabilities. © ILO
HA NOI (ILO News) – The final class of Law on Persons with Disabilities at Hanoi Law University this academic year was busier than ever.

Hundreds of students gathered in the classroom for team presentations looking at different angles of people with disabilities.

‘It was the first time I had had a chance to get to know people with disabilities,’ Nguyen Phuong Thao, student of Group NO3, said, recalling her field trips at Nguyen Dinh Chieu School – a special educational establishment for blind students – and Hoang Mai District’s Association of Disabled Persons to collect materials for her group’s presentation. ‘It’s very interesting to learn about their ability and aspirations.’

The Law on Persons with Disabilities has been an optional course at one of the Viet Nam’s top law schools since 2012 with the support from the International Labour Organization and the Irish Government.

The law came into effect in 2011 to promote the rights of more than 7 million people with a disability – or nearly 8 per cent of the Vietnamese population – and future lawyers and judges well trained in this area are expected to better protect them.

‘The course equips students with important skills so that they can pay attention to and better protect people with disabilities in their future jobs,’ said Dr Nguyen Hien Phuong, lecturer of Labour and Social Protection Laws.

She was glad that the students’ perspectives about people with disabilities and their rights completely changed after the course.

‘I realized that many of my students are really humanitarian. They volunteered to help the organizations they visited,’ she added.

For last-year student To Thi Cam Tu, taking this optional course was a ‘good choice’. ‘I will surely advise junior students to take it,’ she said.

In Viet Nam, only a few people with disabilities have a stable job and regular incomes. Their unemployment rate is at about 30 per cent – much higher than other workers’ groups.

The number of persons with disabilities that have access to loans and vocational training opportunities remains low.

Out of 1.5 million people receiving vocational training every year across Viet Nam, less than 0.4 per cent are those with a disability.

Only 1 per cent of the 8,000 members of the Hanoi Association of Disabled Persons have had access to micro-finance over the last few years.

The ILO estimates that Viet Nam loses 3 per cent of Gross Domestic Product and other countries 3-7 per cent every year by excluding persons with disabilities from labour markets.