The Council for the Prevention and Elimination of Discrimination and Ensuring of Equality that was founded at the end of 2013 has so far examined 420 applications that referred mainly to disability discrimination, the Council’s head Yan Feldman said in a news conference at IPN, which centered on the launch of a campaign to promote equality.

Yan Feldman noted that during the first years of work, the Council issued 230 decisions. Discrimination was ascertained in the case of 103 decisions. 28% of the decisions referred to disability discrimination, while 24% – to gender discrimination. The others referred to discrimination on grounds of language, ethnicity, race and sexual orientation. Some 87% of the country’s population has the perception that discrimination persists in Moldova. Each third citizen said they faced discrimination, while each fifth citizen said they witnessed an act of discrimination. The number of complaints submitted to the Council is on the rise, but the current figure does not show the real situation in the field. Some of the people only write that they were discriminated against on social networking sites, but not do file applications to the Council.

Nadejda Hriptievschi, programs director at the Legal Resources Center of Moldova, said Law 121 on the Equality of Chances is very good, but seems yet to be disjointed and needs to be improved. The authorities should empower the Council for the Prevention and Elimination of Discrimination and Ensuring of Equality to impose penalties. To eliminate discrimination, national policies must be promoted, while the school curriculum should be modified.

In the same news conference, Maxim Miftahov, who was discriminated against by the driver of a minibus by refusing to take him on because he suffers from locomotors disabilities, said he went to court and sought 10,000 lei in respect of non-pecuniary damage. “But my goal is not to obtain this money, which will surely be useful. I want to warn that we are also people and we need the same services,” he stated.

Ludmila Ababii, a young woman with visual impairments, said that in 2015 she went to an interview to get hired as a telephone operator. The employer didn’t even put her on probation so that she could show she can work using a special computer program. Ludmila Ababii now studies journalism and wants to show that the persons with disabilities can also work, but need time to adjust to a particular activity.

Law 121 was adopted in 2012 as a condition imposed by the European partners for liberalizing the visa regime. Then and now, a number of politicians, especially Socialist and Communist ones, as well as priests and parishioners have demanded that the law should be abrogated.