Right to education
MDAC is working to ensure that children with disabilities in Bulgaria receive the education to which they are entitled. This means getting them out of institutions, and ensuring individual care, treatment and education plans. The denial of adequate education for children with intellectual disabilities in Bulgaria is well documented and exposes children to a lifetime of exclusion from society and abuse and is closely linked to their institutionalisation.
Although Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, it maintains one of Europe's highest proportion of institutionalised children, despite the fact that these institutions were specifically referred to with concern by the European Commission before Bulgaria joined the EU. Of these institutionalised children, around 3,000 are denied access to any education at all and a further 10,000 are denied inclusive education. They are instead warehoused in 'special schools' where the level of education is extremely poor.
MDAC tackles discrimination head-on
November 2009 - MDAC and the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee held a round-table event in Sofia on 3 November 2009. See the information bulletin, the event's agenda, a summary of the roundtable event, and the progress report on the implementation of MDAC v. Bulgaria. Some of the roundtable presentations are available here:
October 2008 - The European Committee for Social Rights found violations of the European Social Charter in the collective complaint MDAC v. Bulgaria. Read the:
- information bulletin on the decision
- MDAC v. Bulgaria: decision on the merits in June 2008 and decision on admissibility in June 2007
- summary of the decision with recommendations to the Bulgarian government (pdf and Word).
- summary of a roundtable discussion held in Sofia on 28 October 2008 to bring civil society and the authorities together to discuss how to ensure the right to education to children with disabilities (pdf and Word).
- Intervention by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education
- MDAC's collective complaint application filed in February 2007
June 2008 - The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child issued recommendations to the Bulgarian government to take concrete action to stop this discrimination against children with disabilities. This follows MDAC's shadow report which we sent to the Committee.
2007 - MDAC helped the film company True Vision to develop a documentary for the BBC called Bulgaria's Abandoned Children, a powerful illustration of life in one institution which is large, isolated, under-resourced, abusive and generally unfit for human habitation.