Skip to main content

Press Release - Oppose Protocol for Detention, Forced Treatment; Provide Alternatives #WithdrawOviedo


(Brussels) – Council of Europe member states should oppose new proposed standards regulating the detention and forced treatment of people with disabilities, Human Rights Watch said today. The body in charge of developing the standards, the Council of Europe’s Committee on Bioethics (DH-BIO), consisting of experts from each member state, is to meet on November 21, 2018 in Strasbourg.

The new standards are being developed as a draft Additional Protocol to the Oviedo Convention on Bioethics, a Council of Europe convention that regulates human rights in the framework of biology and medicine. The Additional Protocol aims to provide a framework for involuntary hospitalization and treatment of people with so-called “mental disorder” in Europe. The Council of Europe is an inter-governmental human rights organization consisting of 47 member countries, including the 28 European Union states.

“The Council of Europe prides itself in promoting the highest human rights standards, but the draft Additional Protocol to the Oviedo Convention goes against decades of hard-fought progress towards equal rights for people with disabilities.” said Lea Labaki, of the Disability Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. “European governments should publicly oppose the protocol and stop its further development.”

Read more here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Disability as an Intersectional Human Rights Movement - An Interview with Janice Cambri from the Philippines

TCI Asia Pacific recently interviewed Janice Cambri from the Philippines. A survivor of psychiatry, her personal history is what propelled her to become a disability rights activist. She founded the first advocate group for persons with psychosocial disabilities in the Philippines after being introduced to the CRPD and TCI Asia Pacific in 2014. She works with a strong identity of a self advocate and draws from her own experience to work towards ending human rights violations of persons with psychosocial disabilities. A long time leftist activist, it is Janice’s alliance with the leftist movement in the Philippines that has helped shape her intersectional point of view when it comes to understanding disability. She is a strong advocate for more discussions on capitalism and it’s effect on driving the biomedical mental health systems. For many years now, Janice has been involved in national, regional and international level advocacy not only for the rights of persons with psychosocia...
Post a Comment
Read more

From the Mental Health Movement to the Disability Movement - In Conversation with Yeni Rosa Damayanti

Left: Yeni Rosa Damayanti Recently, TCI Asia Pacific spoke with Yeni Rosa Damayanti, Chairperson of the Indonesian Mental Health Association, about her experience with international, regional and national advocacy in human rights for persons with disabilities, the ideologies she aligns herself with and where she sees and hopes to see persons with psychosocial disabilities in the future. Yeni has many years of experience working on various issues of rights for persons with psychosocial disabilities and her work has not been limited to the mental health sector, often collaborating and engaging with other human rights movements and the cross disability movement. She is also a member of TCI Asia Pacific and has strongly pushed for a paradigm shift in mental health advocacy to move towards the development sector and disability movement. She has considerable experience with advocacy and has been pivotal in changing mental health legislation to be more CRPD compliant and inclusive in Indo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is ‘mental health’ contrary to human rights?

Blog contributed by : Tina  Minkowitz Founder/President Centre for the Human Rights of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry When we go to a doctor’s office we may feel nervous, apprehensive.   We worry about test results, we worry about whether a treatment might do more harm than good.   We put our trust in the practitioner provisionally and hope she is trustworthy and competent.   But ‘mental health’ visits can be something else entirely.   Only in ‘mental health’ can a doctor end a consultation by advising your family to have you locked up under the supervision and control of medicalized wardens, where you will be forced to take mind-numbing and mind-disassembling drugs.   ‘Mental health’ and social failure ‘Mental health’ diagnoses, especially when consultation is initiated by someone other than the person herself, amount to a stamp of social failure, and set in motion a cascade of events leading to delegitimizatio...
Post a Comment
Read more