Human rights are not negotiable. Not in the budget either.
Today is 5 May. The European Day of Protest for Equality of People with Disabilities. It has run since 1992. Each year a different motto, each year the same attempt to make visible what stays invisible the rest of the time. The motto for 2026: human rights are not negotiable.
Sounds like a Sunday speech. It is not. It is a response.
What is on the table right now
Cuts to social services are part of the current budget debate in Germany. Eingliederungshilfe (integration assistance), care funding, school assistants, inclusion services. The numbers shift every month, the pattern stays.
School assistants — Schulbegleitung — is the line item that gets to me most directly. A child with a disability who cannot attend a mainstream school without an assistant has a statutory right to that assistance. It is anchored in SGB IX of the German Social Code. It is anchored in Article 24 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Germany ratified in 2009. Cutting the school-assistant budget is not abstract trimming of “social spending”. It cuts the legal claim that this child goes to fifth grade tomorrow.
The argument in committee usually runs: too expensive, too complex, too inconsistent. Translated: children who are already harder to see cost too much.
What it costs to care for a child
I am not speaking abstractly. I have written elsewhere about what it has meant in our family that a child is chronically ill: two years of operations, hospital stays, agencies, applications. What I want to add here is the part the budget figures usually miss — what this caregiving does to the parents.
Caring for a disabled or seriously ill child is not “another job alongside”. It is the job. Appointments, therapies, applications, hospital stays, special school situations, more applications. It adds up to a full-time role that is unpaid and cannot be negotiated away.
Statistically, between 30 and 40 percent of parents in Germany who care for a severely disabled child give up paid employment in full or in part. In 80 percent of those cases, the parent is the mother. The downstream effects are not “regrettable”: reduced pension entitlements, a hollowed-out CV, financial dependence on a partner or the state. They are the economic side-effect of a policy that still treats care as a private matter.
Cutting school assistants now shifts more of that load onto families. The cut sits in the budget. The downstream costs sit elsewhere: the mother’s lost income, therapies paid out of pocket, residential care places that get more expensive fifteen years later. They do not disappear.
Why this matters today
5 May is not a holiday. It is a pressure point. The motto this year is not a stylistic choice. It is a reminder that a country which signed a UN convention cannot quietly opt out of it during a budget debate.
Inclusion is not a “nice to have”. It is the legal minimum standard. Cutting a minimum standard because it is expensive does not adjust it; it abolishes it.
If you join the protest today, online or in person: good. If you ask your member of parliament where they stand on the cuts: better. If you concretely help a family in your circle, fill in an application with them, drive to a therapy appointment, do their shopping: best.
Human rights are not negotiable. That is not a slogan. It is the agreement we all signed.