Press Release, 31.03.2016

YABLOKO Chairperson Emilia Slabunova asks Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to save the country’s sole Rehabilitation Centre for the Blind and review the conditions for granting subsidies to socially-oriented non-profit organisations.

Since April 1, funding for the Rehabilitation Centre for the Blind of the All-Russia Society of the Blind and its two affiliates will be suspended. This became possible after in January 2016 the Russian government changed the procedure for granting subsidies to non-profit organisations.

According to the new rules, only those public organisations that spend under 50 per cent of the state subsidy on staff salaries and general expenses can count on state support.

However, this rule is not acceptable for the Centre, because the bulk of the money is spent exactly on salaries of employees who work individually with the disabled.

Emilia Slabunova assesses the situation as “monstrous and inhuman” and inaction of officials from the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of the Russian Federation as “inappropriate to their key mission as a power body charged with provision of social protection and rehabilitation of the disabled.”

In Russia there are 280.000 blind people and about 500.000 are visually impaired, the number of such people has been growing by 5.000 annually. Destruction of the only organisation carrying out rehabilitation and employment of the blind and visually impaired people will be a dramatic and, perhaps, the last step to the social catastrophe, said YABLOKO Chair.

The Rehabilitation Centre for the Blind of the All-Russia Society of the Blind implements comprehensive rehabilitation of the disabled and visually impaired, as well as deaf-blind people. The Centre was established in 1963 and initially located in Cheboksary, Chuvashia, and in 1977 was transferred to the Volokolamsk, the Moscow region. The Centre has branches in Biisk, the Altai Territory, and Zheleznogorsk, the Kursk region. There are no other organisations involved in such activities in Russia. Dozens of other such centres Russia inherited as a legacy of the Soviet system of social guarantees, ceased to exist in 1997 – 2005.