Right to the information and comunications of blind and low people

Right to the  information and comunications of blind and low people

Claim of unconstitutionality filed against the Law No. 160 of 2013 “by means of which are granted the rights to access the information, the communications, the knowledge, and the technologies for information and communications to the blind and low vision people”.The claimants argue that the accused disposition should have been processed as a statutory law and not an ordinary one, because the article 152 of the Constitution establishes that the Congress of the Republic have to regulate the “development of fundamental rights and duties of the peoples, as well as the proceedings and recourses for its protection” by this special norm types. Therefore, as the accused law developed the principle of material and effective equality, it should had been subjected to a stricter pathway. On the other hand, they proposed additional charges against the article 12 of the regulation, for considering that a norm that limits the copyrights contained in a law which pretends to adopt measures to achieve a material and effective equality for the visually disabled people, disregards the mandate of coherence between the different dispositions that compose a law.

This Court studied: (i) the scope of the reserve for statutory law regarding fundamental rights, (ii) the copyrights, their fundaments, extents and boundaries, (iii) the principle of equality and its relation to the principle of accessibility to the people in conditions of disability to the information, the knowledge and the communications.This Tribunal concluded that the existence of the Treaty of Marrakech demonstrates that even in the framework of international specialized copyrights, it’s considered necessary that there are boundaries to the patrimonial rights of the bearer, on behalf of the people in conditions of reduced vision or blindness. After careful consideration the Court declared constitutional the demanded articles.