Priority issues of ENUSP for LOI on EU

I will speak about the rights of persons with psychosocial disabilities on behalf of ENUSP, and on behalf of EDF. I will speak about articles 12, 14 and 15.

One key issue is the right to legal capacity.

  1. Substitute decision making and guardianship regimesfor persons with psychosocial disabilities exist in every EU country. This can be either plenary/full guardianship or partial guardianship, which is a violation of CRPD art 12.

The EU has an obligation to end discrimination

(Even though EU may say the right to legal capacity in member states is not within their competence, one can ask oneself what is ratification without enforcing article 12)

We calls on the EU to ensure that all EU member states repeal all forms of guardianship and substitute decision-making, and to promote and realize support systems which respect the will and preferences of the person concerned.

Another key issue is the right to liberty on an equal basis with others.

  1. Deprivation of liberty based on actual or perceived psychosocial disabilities, either in itself or in combination with other criteria such as supposed dangerousness or need for treatment, is also taking place in all EU member states.

The EU is funding institutionalization and ongoing deprivation of liberty by European Funds.

(In reality, this practice is also linked to binding Council of Europe directives, such as the European Convention article 5.1.e, which mentions the lawful detention of `persons with unsound mind, alcoholics, drug addicts and vagrants`, which is hugely discriminatory and outdated)

We call on the EU to ensure that CRPD standards supersede the outdated Council of Europe standards, and to ensure liberty and security of persons with psychosocial disabilities across the EU on an equal basis with others, and to ensure that institutionalization and treatment without the free and informed consent of the person is repealed.

Also the EU must ensure that European Funds cannot be used for ongoing human rights violations, such as segregation and institutionalization of persons with psychosocial disabilities without their free and informed consent.

The third point is:

  1. Torture and cruel inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment, and violation of the integrity of the personis taking place in all member states of the European Union by a large variety of forced psychiatric interventions, includingby forced institutionalization and segregation from the community, forced medication, forced Electroshock, restraints such as belts and caged beds, solitary confinement, forced strip search and body cavity searches, and forced abortion and forced sterilization.

These practices constitute tortureand ill-treatment and need to end.

The EU has the obligation to prevent torture and to provide redress, remedies and a guarantee of non-repetition

This needs to be enforced

(It is important to realize that the standards that are used by the CPT -the Committee of the Prevention of Torture , which performs monitoring visits to places of deprivation of liberty in the EU, including psychiatric institutions–are based on the Council of Europe´s directives, and allow for forced interventions based on psychosocial disability. So the EU cannot rely on the CPT for monitoring the rights of persons with psychosocial disabilities)

We calls on the EU to ensure an end to torture and ill-treatment of persons with psychosocial disabilities, and to ensure that an absolute ban on all forced psychiatric interventions, including a ban on the use of solitary confinement, restraints such as belts and net-beds, non-consensual administration of electroshocks and non-consensual administration of medication is enacted and enforced in all members states in the EU.

And as a final theme I would like to mention:

  1. The problem of access to justice, including in the case of deadly psychiatric interventions, which also happen in every country, and in some psychiatric institutions the mortality rates are shockingly high. In most cases access to justice is impossible, because national laws and the binding directives of the Council of Europe, which are enforced in all EU member states, allow for forced psychiatric interventions and involuntary treatment, resulting in impunity for psychiatric and other staff that perpetrates these acts oftorture and ill-treatment, even in the case of acts directly resulting in the death of the person.

We calls on the EU to addressand resolve the barriers to the human rights of persons with psychosocial disabilities in the EU, which are imposed by art 5.1.e of the European Convention on Human Rights and other Council of Europe standards which allow for forced interventions based on psychosocial disabilities, and which prevent effective access to justice for persons with psychosocial disabilities who have been harmed, ill-treated , tortured or were even killed by forced psychiatric interventions.

Although the EU is independent from the Council of Europe, and the EU may not have a direct influence in changing the Council of Europe’s treaties in itself, there are ways to address the responsibility of the EU to ensure that the CRPD standards supersede the outdated Council of Europe standards. We are open to discuss the approach to the Council of Europe standards, and we suggest to do this outside this side-event, since this issue is very complicated and time in this session is limited.