Executive Board Records of FIMITIC Now Open for Research

FIMITIC was founded in 1953 as an international federation of organizations founded by and advocating for persons with physical disability. It helped the exchange of information among its members and disseminated knowledge about disability; it lobbied governments and international organizations like the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Council of Europe (CoE), and the European Commission, whenever decisions or policies regarding persons with physical disability were on the agenda. FIMITIC organized conferences, workshops and symposia, had its own commissions on construction, on youth, and on women and disability, which conducted research, authored reports, issued statements, and submitted draft bills to legislators. Endorsing the active involvement of its members, FIMITIC has always been guided by persons with physical disability.

In 2008, on the initiative of then Vice-President Dr. Csaba Chikán, the Central Secretariat of FIMITIC was moved from Bonn in Germany to Vác, Hungary. When Dr. Chikán passed away in 2019, and the Central Secretariat relocated to Spain, the historical records of the organization remained in Hungary. Blinken OSA Archivum rescued them from an open-air storage facility just days before the start of the rainy season, in the Fall of 2023. A few weeks later, FIMITIC, with its Central Secretariat still headquartered in Spain, donated the documents to the Archivum.

The records of the International Federation of Persons with Physical Disability (FIMITIC) cover the organization’s activities from the early 1960s to 2015. The documents in (mostly) English and German, but also in French, Hungarian, Italian, and Spanish, include Board meeting and general assembly minutes and resolutions, conference proceedings, country files, correspondence with, and notes from meetings with, the WHO, the ILO, or the CoE, expert commission reports, as well as artefacts like awards and badges.

Starting September 2025, 2nd-year Central European University Historical Studies MA student Sydney Szijarto has been arranging and cataloging FIMITIC’s vast archive amounting to over 100 archival boxes. The first series, HU OSA 468-0-1 Executive Board, covering the period 1967 to 2006, is now up in the Archivum Catalog and open for research in the Archivum’s Research Room (accruals expected). Series HU OSA 468-0-4 Country Files is next; it will be published by the end of January 2026.