Bulgarian authorities, the EU Commission and member states must work together immediately to dismantle Bulgaria’s network of social care homes, and to fund alternative social services for Bulgaria’s disabled children.[1]  Ongoing violations of health and education rights must cease, and reparations should be provided, in the form of compensation, rehabilitation, and remedial education to assist those children and young adults harmed by inhuman or degrading treatment in Bulgaria’s institutions.

 

To the Bulgarian Government:

  • Urgently dismantle the network of social care homes for children and adults with mental disabilities;
  • Do not restrict deinstitutionalization to a prevention of future placement in social care homes;
  • Extend the pilot programmes for day care centres for disabled children and adults;
  • Create and finance a network for foster-care;
  • Ensure that disabled children and young adults who are reintegrated into their family environments can be monitored closely for their safety, welfare and health;
  • Urgently improve health care provision while deinstitutionalization is pending;
  • Amend the law on guardianship so that the Director of a social care home can give informed consent to medical treatment for a disabled child;
  • Finance and provide for a systematic review of the psychiatric diagnoses of children and adults placed in social care homes, genuinely to challenge the flawed assumption that all institutionalized children and adults have mental disabilities;
  • Train experts in child-care, physiotherapy, occupational therapy and special education to care for disabled children and adults in the community – via home visits and work in day centres;
  • Train health-care workers and rehabilitation specialists in a rights-based approach to the care of children and adults with mental disabilities;
  • Combat the stigma and associated discrimination against children and adults with disabilities, as part of a programme of legal reform and community reintegration;
  • Provide reparations in the form of compensation, rehabilitation, remedial education and vocational training for those children and adults who have suffered violations of their human rights while in social care homes.

 

To EU Institutions, member states and international donors:

 

  • Share international expertise on diagnostics, rehabilitation and special education;
  • Train specialist staff members in new methods of rehabilitation;
  • Train doctors in their obligations to treat disabled children and adults from social care homes;
  • Finance the training of a sufficient number of qualified special teachers for children with intellectual and psychiatric disabilities.
  • Do not continue to fund social care homes which seek funding for material improvements: instead direct funding at alternative social services, and the training of specialist staff for community care and post-return monitoring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] See inter alia the obligations of ‘international cooperation, [and] the exchange of appropriate information’ in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 23 (4), and ‘international assistance and cooperation’ in Article 2(1) ICESCR.