MDAC convenes key actors on disability, detention and torture

4 November 2011, Strasbourg –  MDAC co-organised and hosted a roundtable discussion on ‘Evolving Standards in Preventing Torture and Ill-treatment against Persons with Disabilities’. The seminar brought together key high-level stakeholders at the intersection of torture and ill-treatment prevention and disability.

The objectives of the event were to contribute to the cooperation among key stakeholders to further increase the effectiveness of their work, to highlight the importance of visiting psychiatric and social care institutions, and to discuss evolving standards of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) that inspectorates should apply.

The participants of the event included Mr. Thomas Hammarberg, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, and members of the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture (SPT), the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Also attending were, representatives of the European Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry (ENUSP), and the International Disability Alliance (IDA).

Papers were presented by academics and advocates on the most crucial issues such as the importance of inspecting psychiatric and social care institutions, mental health service users as monitors, the limits and justifications of mental health detention, the link between legal capacity and detention, medical treatment and ill-treatment in psychiatric and social care institutions, reasonable accommodations in places of detention, and the role of inspectorates to promote the right to live in the community.

The event was co-organized by MDAC, the Human Rights Implementation Centre at the University of Bristol and the Centre for Disability Law and Policy at the NUI Galway School of Law.

MDAC’s Detention Monitoring work is funded by a grant to MDAC from Zennström Philanthropies.  For more information, contact mdac@mdac.org.