The Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly Thursday 17 March tabled a motion aimed at protecting the rights of “socially maladjusted” persons. The term refers to a formulation in the European Convention on Human Rights drafted in 1949 and 1950. The Convention text authorize the deprivation of “persons of unsound mind” as well as drug addicts, alcoholics and vagrants indefinitely for no other reason than that these persons are having a psychosocial disability or are considered to be “socially maladjusted”.
The Committee motion note, that the right to liberty is one of the most fundamental human rights and as such guaranteed in numerous international human rights treaties, including the European Convention on Human Rights.
European Convention text limits rights
The convention, while widely considered the most effective international treaty for human rights protection, however, has a flaw. The Committee in its motion pointed out, that its “the only international human rights treaty to include a limitation to the right to liberty specifically on the basis of impairment, with its formulation in Article 5 (1) (e), which excludes certain groups (“socially maladjusted” individuals in the wording of the European Court of Human Rights) from the full enjoyment of the right to liberty.”
The exemption text in the Convention was formulated by representative of the United Kingdom, Denmark and Sweden, led by the British to authorize Eugenics caused legislation and practices that was in place in these countries at the time of the formulation of the Convention.
The Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development indicated that “detaining such persons effectively puts these vulnerable groups at higher risk of systemic rights violations, on the spurious grounds that they may pose a danger to public safety or that their own interests may necessitate their detention.”
Paradigm shift
With the worldwide paradigm shift exemplified by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has already unanimously called for an end to coercion in mental health. Its committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development over the last couple of years has been working on a new report on the deinstitutionalisation of persons with disabilities.
The Committee therefore argued that the “Assembly should thus look into how developing and promoting alternatives to detention of the “socially maladjusted” could help Council of Europe member states move with the times and away from the discriminatory concept of excluding certain groups from human rights protection.”
