News
29 July 2013, Budapest. MDAC welcomes a new publication by the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), entitled “Legal capacity of persons with intellectual disabilities and persons with mental health problems”
On 17 July 2013, the New York Times published a letter by Dezideriu Gergely (Executive Director of the European Roma Rights Centre) and Oliver Lewis. It concerns the discrimination in education faced by Roma children and children with disabilities in central and eastern Europe.
26 June 2013. Today, on International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, three NGOs call on the Romanian Prime Minister to take decisive action to end torture and other ill-treatment of young adults, aged between 25 and 35, who are held in a residential institution in Bucharest. The Romanian NGO Centre for Legal Resources, together with the London-based Interights and Budapest-based Mental Disability Advocacy Center issued the following statement.
In a judgment published this week (Nencheva v. Bulgaria, judgment of June 18), the European Court of Human Rights held the Bulgarian government responsible for the death of 15 children and young adults who died in an institution during the winter of 1996/97. The youngest was four and a half, the oldest 22. Mitko Durov, one of the victims, was five when he was placed in the institution in 1995.
One of the human rights violations which older people experience is how their wishes are overridden by others. The right to legal capacity is a core provision in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and actions are being taken to stop infringements of autonomy. A new treaty is being drafted to protect older people’s rights.
7 June 2013. New post on OliverTalks: Psychiatry should step out of the bubble of mental health and join the disability rights world where the right to live in the community means more than access to psychiatric treatments.
Today the European Court of Human Rights fired its first ever shot at the Ukrainian guardianship system, which abuses the rights of an estimated 48,000 people.
30 May 2013, Budapest. The Mental Disability Advocacy Center (MDAC) welcomes the “State of the World’s Children 2013” report issued today by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The focus of this year’s report is children with disabilities. The main message is that inclusion benefits everyone, yet too many children with disabilities continue to face barriers to inclusion.
29 May 2013. New blog post by our Executive Director on how Serbian judges sentence 3,500 people to civil death per year.
26 April 2013.The Russian government should honour the memory of the 38 people who died in a fire in a psychiatric hospital last night by dismantling the country’s gulag system of mental health institutions.