Croatia

My investigation of institutions for adults with intellectual and mental health disabilities in Croatia has just been published by Balkan Insight. It is a shorter and edited version.

Full-length text – here.

 

TED talk

TEDxBG 2011, Yana Buhrer Tavanier, The Forgotten People of Bulgaria

Humans – null and void

My investigation of institutions for adults with intellectual and mental health disabilities in Macedonia has just been published by Balkan Insight.  It is a shorter and edited version.

Full-length text, photos and video – here.

Doychin has waited too long

Victory before the Bulgarian equality body: In November, a group of parents of children with intellectual disabilities, represented by Mental Disability Advocacy Center’s Bulgarian partner, the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, won a case against the Ministry of Education for discrimination against children with special educational needs.

My article on the matter in MDAC’s Newsletter, February 2010.

Published in Sueddeutsche Zeitung

The investigation has been published in Die Sueddeutsche Zeitung on 1 January 2010.

See past publications here, here and here.

Application filed with the ECHR on behalf of five patients who died at a Romanian institution in 2004

via OSMHI website

On Friday 11 December 2009, the Center for Legal Resources and INTERIGHTS filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of five patients who died at the Poiana Mare Psychiatric Hospital in the period January to February 2004.

The hospital has a sad reputation for its record of human rights abuses perpetrated against its residents. Over the two years 2002-2003, 155 patients died at the hospital, with a further 28 people dying during the first five months of 2004, with many of these deaths taking place during winter time. The applicants are four women and a man who suffered from various mental health problems and spent long periods, in some cases their whole lives, in social care institutions.  The applicants died from a combination of poor care and inadequate treatment, as well as extremely substandard living conditions, including insufficient food and heating.

The case raises issues of access to justice for people with disabilities as well as shedding light on the failure of authorities to prevent the numerous abuses perpetrated against people with disabilities inside social care institutions and psychiatric hospitals. The Center for Legal Resources and INTERIGHTS hope that a positive decision from the Court will strengthen further the case against long-stay residential institutions and in favour of community living for people with disabilities.

The applicants are asking the European Court of Human Rights to adapt its requirements on standing and victim status in order to permit the Center for Legal Resources to file this application on the applicants’ behalf. Current standing rules, which state that applicants who are deceased may only be represented by their family, are symptomatic of the sort of procedural barriers that people with disabilities have to face in their access to justice throughout Europe. The NGOs argue that the application on behalf of the patients is justified on the basis that they have no next of kin, that no alternative source of representation is available, and that the highest Romanian court has already recognised the Center for Legal Resources standing to act on the applicants’ behalf (Decision in file no. 4948/1/2006, High Court of Cassation and Justice, 15 June 2006). The NGOs also maintain that it is in the best interest of the realisation of human rights for the Court to hear this complaint.

The case emphasises the plight of individuals who are often termed “social cases” by the authorities – socially marginalised individuals who may, or may not, have mental health issues before entering an institution. Their social status is due mainly to the absence of family or other community-based support, possibly in combination with other factors such as lack of a home, income, or a substance abuse problem. Instead of providing them with the requisite community-based support, authorities are driving vulnerable individuals into social care institutions where they have few procedural safeguards ensuring their right to liberty, and where they spend lengthy periods of time, frequently the remainder of their lives.

The case paints a comprehensive picture of the range of unchecked abuses taking place in social care institutions, as well as the entrenched discrimination towards people with disabilities by those in authority, including medical professionals and other hospital staff, their own communities, and the wider public. Perpetrators of these abuses are very rarely prosecuted despite the existence of laws meant to protect vulnerable people with mental and physical disabilities. Although the Prosecutor’s Office initiated criminal investigations in relation to each of the deaths occurring during the period 2002-2004, in no case was any individual found criminally responsible.

Poiana Mare Psychiatric Hospital is in an isolated countryside location in south-eastern Romania, on an extensive 26-hectare site which formerly housed military barracks. The hospital is also notorious as a place of detention for political dissidents during the Communist regime. Since 1989 the hospital has been used as a place of detention for many categories of patients including patients hospitalised in the context of criminal proceedings, persons with mental health problems or intellectual disabilities and persons suffering from tuberculosis.  The establishment has been visited by the Committee for the Prevention of Torture on three occasions in 1995, 1999 and 2004. Each time the Committee has released a very critical report regarding the conditions at the hospital, requesting the Romanian authorities to take urgent action to remedy the situation. Despite the Committee’s exhortations, the situation at the Poiana Mare Hospital has remained more or less unchanged.

News

Hello, all.

I haven’t been blogging for a while – so here are the most recent news around the investigation.

1. It was published in Vreme, Serbia, and in many, many, many websites and blogs across the region.

2. It was awarded the third prize in the Balkan Awards for Journalistic Excellence.

3. It was published in Der Standard, Austria, yesterday.

All great news, as you can see

I’ll keep you posted about all future developments.

Thank you for your interest.

Rusi goes to Strasbourg (and then back to Pastra)

This is Rusi Stanev. He is a resident of the social care home in Pastra, Bulgaria.

His case was argued before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg two days ago.

Rusi attended the Court hearing in person, becoming the first person from a social care institution to bring his case before Europe’s human rights court.

Apart from Stanev v. Bulgaria, there was another case argued before the ECHR on 11 November - Mitev v. Bulgaria. Mr Mitev died in Pastra last year and his case was continued by his sister. The two cases were both brought jointly by the nongovernmental organisations Bulgarian Helsinki Committee and the Mental Disability Advocacy Center.

Watch the public hearing.

Here’s more from the joint press release by the BHC and MDAC, from yesterday.

“In both cases, the applicants were deprived of legal capacity and placed under guardianship against their will. They applied to the local municipality as well as the prosecutor’s office to restore their legal capacity, these being the two mechanisms which have the discretion under Bulgarian law to apply to a court to have someone’s legal capacity restored. The guardians in both cases refused to cooperate. Mr Mitev’s guardian was his daughter who wanted his legal capacity to be deprived and wanted him to remain in an institution, while Mr Stanev’s guardian was the director of the social care institution where he still resides. The municipality and the prosecutor’s office refused to cooperate. In fact, despite numerous attempts, no Bulgarian court has ever considered the merits of restoring the legal capacity of either applicants.

Both of the men were ordered by their guardians to be placed in a social care institution. Mr Mitev’s guardian arranged for a private security company to escort him to the Pravda institution, which was featured by the New York Times in January 2009. In December 2002 Mr Stanev was detained in the Pastra institution, which in 2003 was visited by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture. The Committee’s resultant report of their visit stated that “[t]he deficiencies in the living conditions and care of residents [...] created a situation which could be said to amount to inhuman and degrading treatment.”

In their applications to the European Court of Human Rights, both applicants alleged:

· That the deprivation of legal capacity was done in such a way as to violate their right to a fair trial (in violation of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights);

· That the deprivation of legal capacity affected the enjoyment of their private and family life (Article 8);

· That they were arbitrarily and unlawfully detained in the social care institution (Article 5(1));

· That there was no judicial review of the lawfulness of their detention (Article 5(4));

· That Bulgarian law allows for no possibility to seek compensation for their unlawful detention (Article 5(5));

· That the conditions of detention (in Mr Stanev’s case) in the Pastra social care institution constituted inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment (Article 3);

· That institutionalisation is itself a violation of the right to respect for private life and home (Article 8); and

· That there were no effective remedies for the above violations (Article 13).

Mr Stanev’s trip to Strasbourg was the first time he had left Bulgaria. The authorities created enormous difficulties for him to leave the institution temporarily to attend the Court hearing. His travel was funded by legal aid of the European Court.

Back in 2002 the Bulgarian government told the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture that they would close the Pastra institution. Government representatives told the Court on Tuesday that this is still the plan. The truth is somewhat different. No steps whatsoever have been taken. Mr Stanev returns to the Pastra social care institution today. In the institution he will wear his winter coat (the heating is turned on only on 20 November) and await the Court’s judgment, which will be issued in several months.

Mr Stanev has been institutionalised in deplorable conditions with a hundred other people for over seven years. Bulgaria – a Member State of the European Union and a member of NATO – is still in denial that it is responsible for subjecting people labelled with mental disabilities with life-long detention, stripping them of their right to make decisions about their own lives, and turning its back on neglect, abuse and death.

The Bulgarian Helsinki Committee and the Mental Disability Advocacy Center will continue to remind the Bulgarian government of its commitments under international law to children and adults with disabilities. They call upon the government to issue an immediate moratorium to new admissions to social care institutions: if the government will not take active steps to close these institutions and develop community-based services, the least they could do is to ensure closure by attrition. When a resident dies their bed should be destroyed. This simple act would force local authorities to find alternatives to segregation and neglect”.

Rusi with his lawyer, Aneta Genova - sitting in the restaurant where Rusi helps with various tasks, and in return gets a meal, coffee, and the feeling to be useful. Rusi has no right to work.

the road to Pastra

inside Pastra

Pastra

Promo video of the investigation

Please, do share. Thank you.

Words by Judith Klein, director of OSMHI

Foreword to the article “Institutions Remain Dumping Grounds for Forgotten People” in the newsletter of the European Coalition for Community Living, Issue No. 10, October 2009

By Judith Klein, Director of the Open Society Mental Health Initiative

Having worked for almost 15 years in Central and Eastern Europe supporting the development of community-based services for people with intellectual disabilities and mental health problems, I applaud Yana Buhrer Tavanier’s article on long stay institutions in this region. Buhrer Tavanier provides an in-depth look at an issue that governments in the region would prefer to ignore.

The Open Society Mental Health Initiative (MHI) has successfully supported the development of person centered, quality, cost effective community-based services such as supported housing, day programs, crisis intervention and supported employment in many Central and Eastern European countries. The target group for these programs is people with mental disabilities, including the most severely and multiply disabled people, and these programs are often held up as models of contemporary practice by national governments. Therefore, it is difficult to understand how governments can continue the unjustified and inappropriate life long institutionalization of people with mental disabilities when the community-based services offer viable and sustainable alternatives that respect the rights of the individuals receiving them.

I have two theories for why the segregation of people with mental disabilities, which is a very severe human rights violation in itself, is allowed to continue. One theory is that society as a whole fails to make the connection between the people incarcerated in institutions and what we expect for ourselves, our family, friends and fellow citizens. This is because, as Buhrer Tavanier’s article portrays so movingly, the residents of these institutions are systematically dehumanized. They are dehumanized by government practices, by staff in the institutions who have no time to treat them as individuals, and by the general public who prefer not to think about this issue. I think of this as the ‘us and them’ mentality. People with mental disabilities are regarded as ‘less than human’, an inferior form of being.  Couple this with the widespread and ingrained stigma and prejudice against them. The result: large, remote institutions where people spend their lives, dying of abuse and neglect, marginalized and forgotten. The bitter irony of this theory is that similar treatment of animals would be an immediate public scandal. This cannot be right.

The other theory is there is a lack of real political will in Central and Eastern Europe to take action necessary to end this appalling practice. At the global level, where deinstitutionalization has been successfully implemented on a large scale, there has, in every case, been strong political will from the central government to support it.

In Central and Eastern Europe, while ‘deinstitutionalization’ has become a popular turn of phrase in policy circles, the truth is that not one government in this region, including the new EU member states, has concrete plans or financing mechanisms to develop networks of community-based alternatives to institutions, which are an absolute prerequisite for successful deinstitutionalization. Alarmingly, new institutions for people with mental disabilities continue to be built across the region, often with European taxpayer funding.

Clearly, there is much work to be done. Thank you, Ms. Buhrer Tavanier for bringing people with mental disabilities in Central and Eastern Europe out of the shadows. MHI will continue its work to enable them to be reunited with their local communities, where they have always belonged.

–

Thank you.