Recommendations to the Czech government

A.  Community living and choice

1. Adopt an immediate moratorium on new admissions to social care institutions in order to stop filling up vacancies. Instead, local governments should be required to find alternatives for each person on the waiting list.
2. Take further action to amend the Civil Code to abolished substituted decision-making and partial guardianship, and ensure that all persons with mental disabilities can access support to make decisions in law and practice.
3. Set a clear national timetable with a maximum time period of five years for the development of comprehensive and accessible community-based services to ensure that people with mental disabilities can live independently in the community. These services should be based on promising practices from pilot projects already in existence. Reforms should also include a focus on providing assistance to families and carers beyond the disability component of social benefits.
4. The national deinstitutionalisation strategy must be extended to cover all long-stay institutions in the country, including social care institutions, those housing children with mental disabilities, and psychiatric institutions.
5. Coordinate national and regional action on deinstitutionalisation and the abolition of guardianship through the designated Article 33(1) government focal point, and publish annual reports on progress made.
6. Abandon plans which use Czech and EU financing to renovate existing institutions, or to build new ones. Instead, use available funding to develop individualised community-based support services to the maximum extent possible.

B.  Access to individualised support services

1. Ensure that people with mental disabilities have equal access to a range of individualised services, including in-home support and assistance, and community mental health teams, which are in reach of all people with mental disabilities in the Czech Republic. This should inform national budgetary priorities, moving resources from institutions to the development of individualised support services.
2. Disability-based social benefits should be provided at a level which allows people with mental disabilities to choose from a range of personal and professional services. People with mental disabilities must have direct control of such benefits, and be able to access supports to decide how to use them.

C.  Access to mainstream services

1. Conduct accessibility assessments of mainstream public services (including schools, healthcare and employment support) with a specific view to identifying barriers for people with mental disabilities. The assessments should inform budgeted plans for reform which should be published.
2. End government support for sheltered work programmes for people with disabilities. Instead, develop, pilot and implement a national ‘access to work’ scheme specifically for people with mental disabilities, in collaboration with civil society and industry leaders. The focus should be on providing access to the mainstream employment market. Explore regulation and funding for the provision of reasonable accommodations in the workplace.
3. Legislate to create an effective right for parents and children with mental disabilities to be guaranteed reasonable accommodations to access mainstream education. ‘Individual integration’ should be abolished, and reforms to the education system should be made to make it inclusive of all children, including those with mental disabilities. Special schools should be closed, with specialised educational staff being transferred to support children in mainstream settings.

D.  Transition from institutions to the community

1. Develop a new, comprehensive national deinstitutionalisation strategy. The strategy should address the rights of all people with mental disabilities to live independently in the community, including residents of social care institutions and people living in psychiatric hospitals. The new strategy should have a maximum five year timespan, and incorporate quantitative and qualitative indicators broken down into annual action plans.
2. The new strategy should contain a detailed analysis of the way in which government funding is currently spent on disability-based services (including institutions), and reallocate future funds away from financing institutions and towards funding community-based services. Annual reports should be made public on the way in which public finances are being spent.
3. Develop individualised transition plans for all people with mental disabilities currently living in institutions, building on the numerous promising practices already in existence in the Czech Republic. The plans must be clearly and explicitly based on the will and preferences of the person concerned. These plans should provide genuine options for living in the community, including in private or family accommodation, identify individualised supports required (and how they will be provided), and should have clear timeframes.

E.  Access to justice, monitoring and public awareness

1. Establish a legal right for people with disabilities to live independently in the community.
2. Ensure that effective and independent complaints mechanisms are made directly available to people with mental disabilities where their right to independent living in the community has been breached. This includes complaints about the failure to provide individualised services or community-living options, the way in which supporters or guardians exercise their powers, and failure to make mainstream services accessible.
3. Ensure that legal remedies are available directly to people with mental disabilities where independent complaints mechanisms have failed. The initiation of legal proceedings must never be determined by guardians or other substitute decision-makers.
4. Collect comprehensive disaggregated data - including statistical and research data - to ensure evidence-based policy and action by government authorities in advancing independent living in the community. The data collected should comply with the requirements of Article 31 of the CRPD and should be published on an annual basis, and identify:
   1. Numbers of people with mental disabilities, including people with intellectual disabilities, people with mental health issues (psycho-social disabilities), age and gender breakdowns, etc.;
   2. The numbers and types of accommodation they live in (institutional and community-based);
   3. Full list of institutions, their size and capacity, breakdown of funding (including funding sources), admissions, and lengths of admissions and discharges;
   4. The types of individualised services available, their geographical scope, funding, and how many people access them; and
   5. Analysis of the numbers of people with mental disabilities who access mainstream services (including education, healthcare and employment assistance), and analysis of the funding of reasonable accommodations.
5. Implement a strategy to raise public awareness about the human rights of people with mental disabilities in conformity with Article 8, CRPD. The strategy must be clear on the concrete steps the government is going to take to reduce stigma and combat discrimination.
6. The criminal law should be amended to classify the targeting of a victim on the basis of their disability as a hate crime, and holding perpetrators accountable. Crime statistics should be reported annually on the prevalence of hate crime against people with disabilities, the investigation of allegations and their disposal.