MDAC launches Croatia report

28 October, Zagreb, Croatia. Last week MDAC, in partnership with The Association for Social Affirmation of People with Mental Disabilities (SHINE), launched the publication “Out of Sight: Human Rights in Psychiatric Hospitals and Social Care Institutions in Croatia”. 

The report (available in Croatian and English) presents the findings of monitoring visits made to four psychiatric hospitals and four social care institutions in June 2010. It makes assessments according to international human rights law and standards, identifies problems in the implementation of these standards and presents specific legislative shortcomings that create limitations or provide an insufficient framework for practice. However, the underlying motivation behind the publication is to highlight the daily lives and experiences of people with intellectual disabilities and people with psycho-social (mental health) disabilities living in these institutions, whether temporarily or as life-long residents. In doing so, the report emphasises the need to focus laws and policies to fulfil the right to live in the community for every person with disabilities.

The launch was attended by staff members of some of the institutions monitored, the Croatian Disability Ombudsperson’s office, representatives of MDAC, SHINE and the monitoring team, Professor Marija Definis-Gojanovic from the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and the UN Sub-Committee for the Prevention of Torture (who wrote the foreword to the report) and the Attaché of the European Union to Croatia.

Coverage of the event by the Croatian television station RTL can be watched below with English subtitles.