Anger as Airline Refuses to Fly Disability Activist

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

A double amputee bomb victim who heads an Angolan disability organisation was thrown off a flight to London, it was disclosed this week.

The Portuguese airline TAP pilot told Carla Luis that she needed a medical certificate or a companion. Several passengers offered to be her �companion� and the much-travelled activist pointed out that she was not sick.

Nevertheless, the pilot refused to take off and she was forced to take another flight.

�Why? I can look after myself. I don�t need a certificate�, Luis told OneWorld this week.

Luis flew to Lisbon on a different airline � and from there took a TAP Portugal flight to London with no trouble.

David Morris, senior policy adviser on disability to London Mayor Ken Livingstone, described it as an �absolute obscenity in this century for anyone to be thrown off a plane for being different.�

Speaking at a meeting in honour of Luis in City Hall on Tuesday, he said, �The simple fact is that the airlines don�t want us on board because we cost them a little bit more.�

Carmen Miranda of the London-based charity Disability and Development Partners (DDP), which works with Luis� organisation, LARDEF, also expressed shock: �It�s incredible. She�s travelled everywhere in Angola and the pilot can�t take her on a flight!

�It�s typical of the problem that LARDEF workers face, day in and day out.�

Kamala Achu, executive director of the DPP (formerly the Jaipur Limb Campaign), told OneWorld that she had written a letter of complaint to TAP but had not yet received a reply.

On Wednesday, the story took another twist, when DPP staff rang TAP to check Luis� booking for the return flight � and were told her name had been wiped off the passenger list.

A DPP official pointed out that TAP was signatory to a European Union protocol on travel and disability and its actions were �a breach of her rights, as well as being a failure to treat Luis decently as a human being.� The organisation said it intended to take up the matter later this week.

Alyson Rose, chief press officer at the UK's Disability Rights Commission, said today, "This is deplorable, and it is exactly the sort of behaviour the new EU regulation introduced in July was intended to stop.

"Although the discrimination took place outside the EU, the fact that it was an EU airline flying within Europe means the regulation applies. Enforcement is the responsibility of the Portuguese Government and whatever body they have appointed for that purpose."

* At the City Hall meeting, Luis said that facilities for Angola�s estimated 1.2 million disabled people were sparse, but that the top priority was advocacy and lobbying: �Angola isn�t doing much for the disabled because the government doesn�t have the information and doesn�t want to have it,� she said. �They think of disabled people as a problem apart, not as a part of society.�

Nevertheless, small changes had occurred that gave hope for the future. One of the priorities was to get disability legislation � which had been under discussion for a decade - on the statute book.

She emphasised the need to talk to and mobilise ordinary Angolans: �Some disabled women�s families teach the women that they can�t be a good wife, can�t have children.

�In hospitals, when women with disability go to have a baby, they are told, �You are a disabled woman � why do you want to have a baby?�

�People don�t believe women with disability can do things, but they do. They want to do things for themselves. They are very strong. Disabled women in Angola are heroes.�

* DRC news release on EU ruling