Bulgaria found guilty of ill-treatment and unlawful detention
"At last! I need a different life, a new life. I need to leave the old and I need to start again."
MDAC client Stefan Stankov on hearing of today's judgment
"The judgment shows again that Bulgaria's guardianship system must urgently change. But I also worry about Mr Stankov's future destiny. I hope he will have his chance to rebuild his life, but I know he needs specific support for rehabilitation after years in isolation."
Aneta Genova, MDAC Legal Monitor, who represented Mr. Stankov
MDAC Legal Monitor Aneta Genova (c) MDAC.
The European Court of Human Rights found that our client Stefan Stankov was unlawfully detained in Bulgarian disability institutions for over 15 years, and was subjected to degrading treatment. In 1999 Mr Stankov was put under guardianship by his mother and ever since then he has lived in institutions, segregated from society and prohibited from authoring his own life.
In the institutions he shared a pool of clothes with other residents. The toilets and bathrooms were unsanitary and dilapidated, and for a decade – day in and day out – the food was “insufficient and of poor quality”. The Court noted that all of this would have created “a sense of inferiority” in Mr Stankov. The main point is that in the institution his life was wasted: the State denied him the right to live in and contribute to his community like everyone else. The Court awarded Mr Stankov 15,500 EUR and ordered the government to pay us 6,000 EUR towards our legal costs.
We’ve been working for many years in Bulgaria and Stankov is just the latest case to illustrate how illogical and unnecessary guardianship systems are. With lawyer Aneta Genova in Bulgaria, we’ve been working to persuade the government to do the right thing and change the law. For three years they have been promising to do so, but still there is no change.
We need to make sure that there are no more Mr Stankovs. You can do two things to help us:
- Encourage the government to legislate to end guardianship by writing to the Minister of Justice, Hristo Ivanov.
- Please donate to help us implement the judgment for Mr. Stankov. This is a great opportunity for you to invest in helping us free 3,000 people who are locked up in Bulgarian institutions.
Read the judgment (in French) here.
We’ll be posting updates over the next few days at www.mdac.org/Bulgaria.